
Class LB H l£. 
Boolc.^___„, 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Childhood, 



Eskimo Child (from Rep. U.S. Bur. of Ednc, 1894), 



Frontispiece 

PAGE 

28 



Periods in the Development of a Laugh (from Photograph 
in possession of Dr G. Stanley Hall), 

' Green Old Age ' among the Ainu of Japan ^from Rep. 
U.S. Nat. Mus., 1890), ..... 

Infantile Cry, the Origin of Speech (from Wilson, 687, 
P- 516), 

Primitive Representations of Speech — Ancient Mexican 
and Modern Ojibwa (from Rep. Btir. Ethnol.), 1889-90, 

Drawing of Hen by Six-year-old Child, 

Drawing of Grouse by Kootenay Indian, . 

Drawing of Man by Six-year-old Child, 

I Drawing of Woman by Six-year-old Child, 

Drawing of Sunset by Kootenay Indian, . 

Drawing of Coyote or Prairie Wolf by Kootenay Indian 

Drawing by Six-year-old Girl, .... 

The Borderland of Atavism. A ' soft tail ' on a Chinese Boy 
8 years old (drawn by R. A. Cushman from Figure in 
Bull. Soc, d^Anthr. de Paris, 1872, p. 540), 
xi 



50 

104 

106 

106 
172 
172 
190 
191 
194 

J95 

206 

2X2 



Xll LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

A Young Barbarian. A Pueblo Indian Girl, aged about 15 

(from Rep. U.S. Nat. Mus., Vol. VIII.), . . .286 

The ' Bear Mother. ' Slate Carving of Haida Indians, repre- 
senting the agony of the mother in suckling her child, 
half-human, half-animal (from Rep. U.S. Nat. Miis., 1888), 354 

Ainu Girl (from Rep. U.S. Nat. Mtis., 1890), . . .396 

The Late Chief 'Vanishing Smoke,' of the Mohawks of 
THE Grand River, Ontario, Canada (from Rep. Prov. 
Archceol. Mns., Ontario, 1898), .... 416 

Alaskan Eskimo Girl (from Rep. U.S. Comni. of E due, 1894), 434 



THE CHILD 

A STUDY IN THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 



/ 



BY 



ALEXANDER FRANCIS CHAMBERLAIN, M.A., Ph.D. 

Lecturer on Anthropology in Clark University 
Worcester, Mass. 



ILLUSTRATED 



LONDON 

WALTER SCOTT, LIMITED 

PATERNOSTER SQUARE 

1900 






L> 



CL : c 









TO HIS WIFE 

ISABEL 

WITHOUT WHOSE AID AND INSPIRATION THIS BOOK COULD 

NEVER HAVE BEEN WRITTEN, IT IS LOVINGLY DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR 

AND TO THE 

Rev. GEORGE W. KENT 

OF WORCESTER, MASS. 

IN RECOGNITION OF THE FRIENDSHIP OF MANY YEARS, AVITH 

ITS NEVER-TO-BE-FORGOTTEN ASSOCIATIONS, 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/childOOcham 



PREFACE 

This volume, which is neither a treatise 
on embryology, nor an essay in anatomy or 
physiological psychology, is intended as a study 
of the child in the light of the literature of 
evolution, an attempt to record and, if possible, 
interpret some of the most interesting and 
important phenomena of human beginnings in 
the individual and in the race. 

In his examination and consideration of the 
numerous authorities consulted and theories 
investigated, the author has constantly en- 
deavoured to be fair-minded and just, and has 
often preferred to retain the ipsissmia ve7^ba of 
those who have said certain things well rather 
than to weaken or condense the argument. 

Wherever it has been possible, exactitude in 
reference has been practised, and the Biblio- 
graphy will, it is hoped, serve as a guide to 
the evolutionary literature of the child in 



Vlll PREFACE 

respect of matters discussed In these pages. 
To his colleagues in the University, especially 
to President G. Stanley Hall and Dr W. H. 
Burnham, the author expresses his gratitude for 
many kindnesses in the way of advice and 
suggestion, the loan of books and articles, and 
such other courtesies as smooth the path of the 
scientist. His thanks are also due to Mr Have- 
lock Ellis, the Editor of the Conte^nporary Science 
Series, for many valuable suggestions, and to Mr 
Louis N. Wilson, the Librarian of the University, 
for the liberality v^ith which he has placed at his 
disposal books otherwise unobtainable. 

To the authorities of the Bureau of American 
Ethnology, the U.S. National Museum in Wash- 
ington, D.C., and the Provincial Archaeological 
Museum of Ontario, the author returns his thanks 
for the readiness with which they have granted 
permission to reproduce certain illustrations from 

their reports. 

A. F. C. 

January \ 900. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



CHAP. 

I. The Meaning of the Helplessness of Infancy, 



II. The Meaning of Youth and Play, 

III. The Resemblances of the Young, 

IV. The Periods of Childhood, 

V. The Language of Childhood, . 
VI. The Arts of Childhood, . 
VII. The Child as Revealer of the Past,. 
VIII. The Child and the Savage, 
IX. The Child and the Criminal, . 
X. The Child and Woman, . 
XL Summary and Conclusion, 
Bibliography, . . . . . 

Index, . . . . 



29 

51 
107 

173 

213 V^ 

287 
355 
397 V^ 

441 v.--^ 

465 
497 



THE CHILD 

CHAPTER I 

THE MEANING OF THE HELPLESSNESS OF INFANCY 

Man at Birth. — How far man is from perfection when he 
begins Hfe has been described by the old Latin philosopher, 
Lucretius, who wrote so many strangely modern things about 
the childhood of the race and the childhood of the individual : 
' A child at its birth, like a mariner cast ashore by the angry 
waves, lies prostrate on the earth, naked, speechless, destitute 
of all the aids to existence, from the moment when it reaches 
the shores of light, torn from its mother's bosom by the efforts of 
nature ; and it fills the place it has entered with dismal waihngs.' ^ 

Major J. W. Powell, in his sketch of man's progress. From 
Barbarism to Civilisatio7i (505, p. 97), puts the same thought 
into somewhat different words : ' Every child is born destitute 
of things possessed in manhood, which distinguish him from 
the lower animals. Of all industries he is artless ; of all institu- 
tions he is lawless ; of all languages he is speechless ; of all 
philosophies he is opinionless \ of all reasoning he is thought- 
less ; but arts, institutions, languages, opinions and mentations 
he acquires as the years go by from childhood to manhood. 
In all these respects the new-born babe is hardly the peer of 
the new-born beast ; but, as the years pass, ever and ever he 
exhibits his superiority in all of the great classes of activities, 
until the distance by which he is separated from the brute is so 
great that his realm of existence is in another kingdom of nature.' 

The meaning of the helplessness of the human babe has 
only become apparent within our own century ; it has taken the 
philosophers long to appreciate the full significance of the pro- 
longation of human infancy. With the ancient writers, as with 
many primitive peoples, the weakness and hapless condition of 
1 De Rerum Naficrd, Bk. V. 
A 



2 THE CHILD 

the very young child so impressed themselves upon them that 
their real meaning was undiscovered. Indeed, the play of the 
active boy and girl was earlier and more correctly interpreted 
than the enforced inactivity of the infant. Mythology, and, 
later, false theology, complicated the subject, and when science 
grew to be strong it almost forgot the little child in the multi- 
tude of its other interesting and absorbing subjects of research. 

Prolongation of Human Infajtcy. — Nevertheless, as Professor 
Butler has recently pointed out, the doctrine of the prolonga- 
tion of human infancy, which Professor John Fiske has so ably 
shown to be part of the theory of evolution, was anticipated 
by Anaximander of Miletus, who flourished about 565 B.C. 
Professor Butler's discovery, however, was itself anticipated by 
Burnet in his Ea?'ly Greek Philosophy (95, p. 74) by a couple 
of years. Burnet, after quoting the Theophrastean account 
of the speculations of Anaximander concerning the origin of 
man, — ' Further, he says that in the beginning man was born 
from animals of a different species' [was like a fish in the begin- 
ning]. ' His reason is, that, while other animals quickly find 
food for themselves, man alone requires a prolonged period of 
suckling. Hence, had he been originally such as he is now, he 
could never have survived,' — observes 'the reference to the 
long period of nursing required by the offspring of the human 
race really contains a very acute piece of scientific reasoning.' 

But the credit of the scientific interpretation of the prolonga- 
tion of human infancy is still due to Professor John Fiske, who, 
in his Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, which was published in 
1874, was the first to indicate its true significance in the evolu- 
tion of humanity. Darwin, with overwhelming evidence, had 
shown how man's physical organism had evolved from the 
creatures beneath him, the anthropoid apes being his nearest 
congeners; Wallace had shown how the next fact to exhibit 
the operation of natural selection in the development of man 
was his intelligence, whose variations now began to be of more 
importance and utility than mere variations of bodily structure. 
Instead of brute force, mental acuteness enabled man to sur- 
vive, and his intelligence spent itself in the invention of devices 
(clothing, implements and weapons, food preparation, etc.), 
which became his salvation to a greater extent than had been 
hairy covering, strong limb, or fleetness of foot ; he was learn- 
ing how to live by his wits. Naturally enough, as his intelli- 
gence continued to augment, the skilful hand and the new-born 



MEANING OF THE HELPLESSNESS OF INFANCY 3 



mind interacting, the size and complexity of the brain of man 
increased also, and the more perfect organisation of the think- 
ing part in adult age had, as a necessity, to be preceded by a 
very much less definite organisation at birth. Hence, argued 
Mr Fiske, the phenomenon of human infancy, so strikingly 
different from that of the rest of the animal world. 

Infant Man and Infant Aniinals. — A comparatively witless 
infancy must augur the high intellectual achievements of the 
men and women of the race. What a vast change from the 
amoeba, at the beginning of the animal scale, to the human 
infant at the top. There parent and offspring are practically 
one, with no immaturity and no need of education. And 
between the two lie all varieties of animal kind, with ever- 
increasing complexity of structure and intelligence in the adult, 
and ever-lengthening infancy and childhood in the offspring. 
To use the apt words of Principal Russell (291, p. xix.) : 'It 
is written that he is " born like the wild ass's colt " ; but this 
overstates the fact in his favour, for the wild ass's colt is greatly 
his superior at birth. The human infant is, in truth, much more 
on a par with the lowly marsupials, the kangaroo and opossum, 
and requires for a longer period even than they the maternal 
contact, the warmth and shelter of the mother's arms. And not 
only does man thus begin life at the very bottom of the ladder, but 
he " crawls to maturity " at a slower pace by far than any of the 
animal species. Long before he reaches manhood most of the 
brute contemporaries and playmates of his infant years will have 
had their day, and declined into decrepitude or died of old age.' 

How man has lingered in being born may be seen from a 
glance at the following table, which contains the incubation 
periods or gestation periods for man and other animals : — 



Animal 


Period. 


Animal. 


Period 


Animal. 


Period. 


Coluber 


12 days 


Guinea-pig 


7 weeks 


Sheep 


21 weeks 


Hen 


21 ,, 


Cat 


8 ,, 


Goat 


22 ,, 


Duck 


21 ,, 


Marten 


8 ,, 


Bear 


39 ,, 


Goose 


29 „ 


Dog 


9 „ 


Small Apes 


39 „ 


Stork 


42 ,, 


Fox 


9 » 


Deer 


36-40 w'ks. 


Cassowary 


65 „ 


Foumart 


9 ,, 


Woman 


40 


Mouse 


24 ,, 


Badger 


10 ,, 


Horse 


II months 


Rabbit 


32 ,, 


Wolf 


10 ,, 


Camel 


II ,, 


Hare 


32 ,, 


Lion 


14 ,, 


Rhinoceros 


18 „ 


Rat 


5 weeks 


Pig 


17 ,, 


Elephant 


24 „ 



4 THE CHILD 

It will be noticed that the small apes and some deer approach 
man very closely in the period of gestation, while the horse, 
camel, and especially the elephant and the rhinoceros, exceed 
man considerably. The prolongation of gestation must stand 
in some relation to the particular species of animal in question, 
and be connected with its evolution. Man's social environ- 
ment is trusted to protect the helpless infancy into which he is 
born, not his physical strength or his lower instincts as in the 
case of many animals. 

Much interesting information concerning the physical and 
psychical development of young animals is contained in Pro- 
fessor Wesley Mills's study of the Nat^^re and Development of 
Animal Intelligejice, where some of the relativities and some 
of the genialities of animal life are well discussed. Of the dog 
we are told ' as soon as a puppy is born it is capable of cries, 
crawling and sucking, and, if we except those concerned with 
the vital or vegetative function, these about cover all its pos- 
sible movements. Up to the period when the eyes open there 
are no new movements,' and, again, ' indeed, after the fiftieth day, 
these resemblances ' [to the mature dog] ' are so numerous, or, 
in other words, the puppy is so matured, so fully equipped 
physically, that much less interest, or, at all events, import- 
ance, attaches to the study of his physical life ' (427, p. 268, p. 
164). The cat develops more rapidly than the dog, and has 
more of the wild animal about it, ' the nature of the dog being 
much nearer to that of man than is the cat's ' ; the dog also is 
'essentially a social and a gregarious animal, the cat an in- 
dependent and solitary creature, traits which are early shown.' 
The dog also is 'docile in the highest degree; the cat to a 
slight degree as compared with her intelligence' (427, p. 232). 
The dog, evidently, approximates to the child in his slower 
development, his sociality and his docility \ and these are the 
factors which have given man his superiority. 

Effect of Prolo?igation of Infa?tcy. — The effect of the pro- 
longation of infancy in the individual was to ensure the sociahty 
of the race. In Mr Fiske's words : ' The prolonged helpless- 
ness of the offspring must keep the parents together for longer 
and longer periods in successive epochs ; and when at last the 
association is so long kept up that the older children are grow- 
ing mature, while the younger ones still need protection, the family 
relations begin to become permanent. The parents have lived 
so long in company that to seek new companionships involves 



MEANING OF THE HELPLESSNESS OF INFANCY 5 

some disturbance of ingrained habits ; and, meanwhile, the older 
sons are more likely to continue their original association than 
to establish associations with strangers since they have common 
objects to achieve, and common enmities, bequeathed and ac- 
quired, with neighbouring families. As the parent dies, the 
headship of the family thus established devolves upon the 
oldest, or bravest, or most sagacious male remaining. Thus 
the little group gradually becomes a clan, the members of 
which are united by ties considerably stronger than those 
which ally them to members of adjacent clans, with whom 
they may indeed combine to resist the aggressions of yet 
further outlying clans or of formidable beasts, but towards whom 
their feelings are usually those of hostile rivalry.' Thus, out 
of the helplessness of the child has arisen the helpfulness of 
men ; from a gregarious, man has become a social being. 

Mr Alexander Sutherland, enlarging upon Darwin, has 
lately sought to show, in his elaborate discussion of The Origin 
and Growth of the Moral Instinct^ how all morality proceeds 
directly or indirectly from parental sympathy, which has arisen 
by slow degrees out of pre-human parental care, which is 
closely correlated with the duration of growth in the offspring, 
which last is bound up with progression in the complexity of 
the organism. Out of parental, conjugal and social sympathy 
thus initiated has developed the whole complex of our morality. 
The share of the child and of woman in the development of 
' milder manners, purer laws ' was recognised by Lucretius, 
who thus writes of the results of human marriage and love 
after the discovery of fire and house-building.^ 

The influence of the child is recognised in many of the 
myths and legends of primitive peoples, as the present writer 
and Mr W. W. Newell {Journ. Avier. Folk-Lore^ IX. p. 237) 
have pointed out. As Mr Newell well says, in such of our 
familiar nursery tales as are genuine, ' the nursery feature is an 
accident,' and they 'appealed originally to the interest of the 
entire community.' In the Hero-Child myth, so common 
among the American aborigines, we see the folk-recognition of 
'heaven-born mastership,' 'innate capacity,' 'divine birth,' in 
a word, an acknowledgment of the genius of childhood. 
These myths and legends are the psychical accompaniment of 
the physical fact of the prolongation of human infancy and of 
its sociological role among men. 

1 De Rerum Naturd, Bk. V. 



6 THE CHILD 

Rousseau, as Groos notes (253, p. 151), had not a little 
appreciation of the real significance of childhood and youth, 
for in his Entile (Bk. I.) he observes that ' if man came into 
the world grown up, he would be a perfect imbecile, an auto- 
maton, an immovable and almost insensible statue,' and, again, 
' we pity the state of infancy ; we do not perceive that the 
human race would have perished if man had not begun by 
being a child.' It has survived through his knowing by child- 
education how to become a man. Out of the development of 
his own faculties, which has arisen through his weakness, has 
come at last his strength, the limit of his genius, the depth of 
his wisdom. 

The lengthening of the period of intra-uterine life and the 
prolongation of human infancy, the period of plasticity and 
educability, have been in reality the making of man. Pro- 
fessor Butler does not exaggerate when he says (100, p. 10) : 
' The factor in history that has changed the human being from 
a gregarious animal to a man living in a monogamous family, 
is, if anthropology and psychology teach us anything, unques- 
tionably the child.' In a sense man has not lived for the 
child, but the child has lived for man. By reason of his 
childhood man is enabled to advance beyond the condition of 
his fathers. The existence of human childhood has made 
possible human civilisation. 

The period during which the human child is suckled by its 
mother varies considerably among the races of men. Accord- 
ing to Ploss (498, II. p. 379), a German woman 'rarely suckles 
her child a full year, although in the country and among the 
proletariat of the towns suckling may last two years sometimes, or 
even more,' the natural deterioration and decrease of the milk 
acting as a determining factor, together with the presence and 
substitution of other foods. With some primitive and some 
civilised peoples the period of suckling is much longer. 

The data upon the subject are, however, still far from being 
altogether satisfactory, and there are evidently great individual 
differences in the same tribe, or even community. It would 
seem that the majority of peoples on the globe suckle their 
children during one to four years, and the largest number of 
these from two to three years. Among the causes which have 
led, in various parts of the world, to longer periods of suckling 
Ploss enumerates motherly tenderness and weakness towards 
the child, the pleasurable feeling excited in the mother by the 



xMEANING OF THE HELPLESSNESS OF INFANCY 7 

sucking of her child, and also the widespread belief that so 
long as she suckles her child a woman may remain without 
fear of becoming pregnant, an idea known in civihsed Ger- 
many and in some islands of the South Pacific, but utterly 
unknown in many other parts of the globe. The length of 
the suckling period does not appear to stand in any ^direct 
relation with intelligence among primitive peoples, y^essels 
tells of a young Eskimo of King William's Land, who, although 
fourteen or fifteen years of age, after returning from the hunt, 
ran up to take, suck of his mother, and Organisjanz saw 
among the Armenians of the Kuban district in the Caucasus 
a boy of six or seven years, who, although not yet weaned, 
went to school.X The prolongation of the suckling period 
among primitive^ races would seem, therefore, to be often 
accidental or incidental (498, IL p. 381). 

The Prolongation of the Growing Period in Man. — The 
whole period of growth in man, adolescence (if we interpret 
the term literally), seems to form a considerably larger portion 
of his life than the corresponding epoch in the existence of 
other mammals. The fact that ' the ratio of length of adoles- 
cence to length of life in the shortest - lived mammals is 
proportionately very much less than it is in longer-Hved 
mammals,' is noted by Dr W. Ainslie Hollis^ and Mr E. 
D. Bell. Dr HoUis fixes the completed growth of man ' by the 
union of the sternal epiphysis of the clavicle to its shaft at 
25,' although there are 'great individual differences in the 
osseous union of the epiphyses,' and 'all the epiphyses were 
observed by Otto to be separate in the skeleton of a man aged 
27 years, who, had he lived, might truthfully have posed as a 
youth when he was on the verge of 40.' It is apparent, 
therefore, that 25 years as the time for the 'completed 
growth' of man, and 75 years for his 'length of life,' are only 
approximate figures, since the former is perhaps too low, and 
the latter leaves out of consideration 'exceptionally long lives.' 
Mr Bell, who accepts the time of union of the epiphyses with 
the skeleton as the ' best measure of the period of maturity,' 
considers that the period of maturity is ' about from one and a 
half times to twice the period of puberty : one and two-thirds 
and twice seem common proportions. Man, for example, 
arrives at puberty at about 15, and is mature at 25; the lion 
and tiger arrive at puberty at 3 years, and are mature at 6.' 
^ Nature, LIX, p. 224, p. 487. 



5 THE CHILD 

The following table, compiled from those of Dr Hollis and 
Mr Bell, shows the progressing lengthening of adolescence 
with mammalian longevity : — 

COMPARATIVE ADOLESCENCE AND LONGEVITY. 



Animal. 



Dormouse .... 
Guinea-pig .... 
Lop Rabbit (Buck) . 
(Doe) . 
Cat 

Goat 

Fox 

English Cattle . . 

Large Dogs . . . 

English thoroughbred 

Horses .... 

Hog 

Hippopotamus 



Lion 

English Horse (Hun- 
ter) 

Arab Horse 

Camel 

Man 

Man (Englishman) . 
Elephant .... 
Elephant .... 



Authority, 



HolHs 

Flourens ; Hollis 

R. O. Edwards 

Mivart 

Jennings 

Pegler 

Mivart 

Hollis 

Dalziel 

Hollis 

Long ; Hollis 
Chambers's Ency- 
clopaedia 
Mivart 



Blaine ; HoUis 

Holhs 

Flourens 

Buffon 

Hollis 

Darwin 

Holder, etc. 



Length of 
Adoltscence. 



3 months 



8 „ 

1 year 

2 years 

I y'ar and 3 m'nths 

1 „ and 6 ,, 

2 years 
2 ,, 

4 y'ars and 6 m'nths 

5 years 

5 ,, 

6 „ 

6 y'ars and 3 m'nths 

8 years 

8 „ 

25 „ 

25 „ 

30 „ 

35 „ 



Length of 
Life. 



4-5 years 
6-7 „ 



12 

IS : 
12 , 

13-14 
18 ., 
15-20, 



30 , 

30 , 
30-40, 

35 , 
40 , 
40 , 
90-100, 

75 ^ , 
100 , 
120 , 



Human adolescence would appear to be from one-third to 
one-fourth of life according to Hollis and Buffon. The 
centenarian's term of life makes it but one-fourth, as compared 
with the one-fifth of the Arab horse, the two-fifteenths of the 
thoroughbred horse, the one-ninth of EngUsh cattle, the 
one-eighth of the lop rabbit, the one-twelfth of the guinea-pig, 
and the one-sixteenth of the mouse. If the expectation of 
life at 25 years of age be considered, some 40 years remain to 
man after such maturity, adolescence and length of life being 
in the proportion of i.2-|. In many respects this lengthening 
of the period of growth or adolescence in man is one of the 
most remarkable phenomena of his existence — intra-iiterine 



MEANING OF THE HELPLESSNESS OF INFANCY 9 

life, infancy, childhood, youth, seem all to have increased in 
duration, for the shaping of the human being, and the compli- 
cated environment accompanying modern civilisation tends to 
lengthen more and more the period of immaturity/ In a sense, 
then, the child is really the ' father of the man,' for the modern 
man is becoming more and more of a child, or rather the 
modern child is losing less of childhood in the process of 
becoming a man. Emphasis has been laid upon this prolong- 
ation of adolescence by Dr G. Stanley Hall as one of the most 
notable features of modern human society. Professor N. M. 
Butler (100, p. 10) points out that 'while the physiological 
period of adolescence is only 14 or 15 years, the educational 
period is nearly twice as long ; indeed the period in which 
social heredity finds him still plastic has come to be about 30 
yearS;>^n fixing the age for Congressman at 25, and for 
Senator at 30, the framers of the Constitution of the United 
States unconsciously safeguarded popular education for the 
future at least. The ages to come must interpret the saying 
of Schleiermacher : ' Being a child must not hinder becoming 
a man ; becoming a man must not hinder being a child,' 



CHAPTER II 

THE MEANING OF YOUTH AND PLAY 

Play Theory of Schiller. — Schiller, in his Letters on the ^Esthetic 
Education of Mankind, published in 1794, made the following 
statement (252, p. 2): 'Nature has indeed granted even to 
the creature devoid of reason more than the mere necessities 
of existence, and into the darkness of animal life has allowed a 
gleam of freedom to penetrate here and there. When hunger 
no longer torments the lion, and no beast of prey appears for 
him to fight, then his unemployed powers find another outlet. 
He fills the wilderness with his wild roars, and his exuberant 
strength spends itself in aimless activity. In the mere joy of 
existence insects swarm in the sunshine, and it is certainly not 
always the cry of want that we hear in the melodious rhythm 
of bird songs. There is evidently freedom in these manifesta- 
tions, but not freedomx from all necessity, only from a definite 
external necessity. The animal w^orks when some want is the 
motive for his activity, and plays when a superabundance of 
energy forms this motive — when overflowing life urges him to 
action.' This anticipates, if, indeed, it is not the source of, 
the theory of Herbert Spencer, that superfluous energy is the 
cause of play (252, p. 4). Spencer, in his F?'inciples of 
Psychology,'^ informs us he had ' met with a quotation from a 
German author to the effect that the aesthetic sentiments 
originate from the play-impulse ' — a view which the great 
English philosopher made very popular. Commenting upon 
the fact that Schiller w^as the author in question, Dr Groos 
remarks (252, p. 3): 'The doctrine of the origination of the 
aesthetic feelings from play-impulses is the cardinal point of 
Schiller's theory of the beautiful as it is revealed to us in these 
letters on aesthetic education.' Wallaschek (674, p. 232) 
1 Vol. II. p. 621. 
10 



THE MEANING OF YOUTH AND PLAY II 

reminds us that, in Germany, the play-impulse {Spieltrieb) 
theory is looked upon as an English idea, while English writers 
trace it to Germany, and to Schiller in particular, the truth 
being, however, that the German poet and philosopher was 
himself indebted in his aesthetic thinking to Pope, Addison 
and Henry Home (Lord Kames) — the fifth chapter of Home's 
Elements of Criticisju containing 'approximations to the 
Spieltrieb theory.' It is no more than natural that a play- 
theory should ultimately hail from England, since the people 
of that country have preserved so much of the naivete^ spon- 
taneity and exuberance of the activity in question. One of 
Home's observations (305(2, p. 189), 'Play is necessary for 
man in order to refresh himself after labour ; and, accordingly, 
man loves play, even so much as to relish a play of words,' 
must be read in relation to another statement made by him 
(305, IV. p. 3), ' Infants of the human species, little superior 
to brutes, are, hke brutes, governed by instinct ; they lay hold 
of the nipple without knowing that sucking will satisfy their 
hunger ; and they weep, when pained, without any view of 
relief.' Human thought, in its infancy, is, like human move- 
ments, instinctive. 

Gutsmuths. — Many of the ideas in Home are better ex- 
pressed, though independently arrived at, in the remarkable 
volume on Flay, published by Gutsmuths, ' the father of play 
in Germany,' towards the end of the eighteenth century. 
Gutsmuths recognised the universality of play among all ages 
and all peoples, the infinite number of games and the skill 
exhibited by the race in their invention and manipulation, the 
health-giving quality of play and its ultimate origin (though 
fatigue and ennui served it for occasion) in the natural impulse 
of activity. According to Gutsmuths (259, p. 2): 'In play 
strictly so understood, the player has no other object than the 
satisfaction of the free operation of his activity.' Here he 
draws some of his inspiration from Schiller, for he refers to Die 
Moren, a periodical to which the latter contributed. He also 
cites from Wieland, without giving exact reference, the following 
passage (259, p. 5): 'Play is the first and only occupation 
{Beschdftigu?tg) of our childhood, and remains the pleasantest 
our whole life long. To toil like a beast of burden is the sad 
lot of the lowest, the most unfortunate and the most numerous 
class of mortals, but this is contrary to the intent and wish of 
Nature. The finest arts of the Muses are plays, and (as Pindar 



12 THE CHILD 

sings) without the modest Graces even the gods begin neither 
festival nor dance. Take away from life what is the enforced 
service of iron necessity, and what is all that is left but play ? 
Artists play with Nature, poets with their imagination, philoso- 
phers with their ideas, the fair sex with our hearts, and kings, 
alas ! with our heads ! ' 

The role of ennui in the stimulation of play, according to 
his theory, is well illustrated by Gutsmuths's observation that 
when ennui entered the hut of primitive man, pleasure took 
him by the hand and, the dance begun, movement-play solaced 
the first men ; but when huts had changed to palaces and 
ennui again appeared, movement being forbidden, pleasure 
muzzled her mouth and cards were resorted to. /The general 
necessity for play is evidenced by the widespread character of 
plays all over the globe, and plays more than anything else 
reveal national and racial character, the touch of the people is 
upon them, and ' by their plays shalt thou know them ' — the 
childish negro, the Frenchman always paying court, the super- 
stitious Spaniard, the warlike American Indian all reveal 
themselves in their plays. Gutsmuths cites Wieland again on 
this point (259, p. 13): 'And where is man less upon his 
guard than when he plays? Wherein is the character of a 
nation more genuinely reflected than in its ruling amusements ? 
What Plato says of the music of any people holds also of its 
plays : ' There is no alteration in them that is not the herald 
or the result of a change in its moral or political condition.' 
Play is a revealer of character, and is never seen to better 
advantage than in childhood, when, as Home says (305a, 
p. 215), there is little or no disguise, 'for a child, in all things 
obedient to the impulse of nature, hides none of its emotions ; 
the savage and the clown [/.^., rustic] who have no guide but 
pure nature, expose their hearts to view by giving way to all the 
natural signs.' In the playing child we ' recognise the anxious 
care of nature to discover men to each other.' 

Gutsmuths came very near the heart of the question when 
he said (259, p. 22) : 'Work, serious occupations, and converse 
with adults are artificial roles of youth, in which they gradually 
make their debut on the grand stage of life; plays, however, 
are natural roles in their own youthful Paradise.' Nowhere 
else are the young so little limited in their actions and con- 
duct by adults — nowhere are they freer, more natural, more 



THE MEANING OF YOUTH AND PLAY 1 3 

human than here. In play all the vices and virtues reveal 
themselves, and ' the youth is smoothed down like the pebble 
in the brook — a thing which happens always the sooner the 
better, provided only the stream is not too tainted and muddy.' 
Moreover, play gives a picture of human life in the small, and 
is of great educational value, for through it alone can youth in 
many respects be moulded to the later and manifold activities 
of life. Gutsmuths recognises the fact that dislike for work 
does not originate in play, but finds its cause in mistakes of 
education, and denounces the custom of trying to get work out 
of children by promising them play afterwards. For him plays 
are exercises of body and of mind, and in his comments upon 
the various sorts and species of plays he anticipates much that 
is to be found in the writings of Johnson, Gulick and others 
who have discussed ' education by plays and games,' especially 
the role of the particular plays in the exercise and development 
of the several senses. 

Froebel. — Coming after Gutsmuths, Froebel, the genius to 
whom we owe the ' kindergarten,' vitaHsed the stray atoms of 
the play-philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Quintihan, Rabelais, 
Fenelon, Locke, Richter, and others who had sought, if not a 
royal, at least a pleasant, road to learning, and created a system 
of play-education for young children. Froebel himself believed 
that 'Play is the purest, most spiritual activity of man at this 
stage, and at the same time typical of human life as a whole 
of inner hidden natural life in men and all things. It holds 
the sources of all that is good. The plays of children are the 
germinal leaves of all later life' (225, p. 30). Play and speech 
(which, after all, is a sort of play), he thought, made up the 
life of the child, playing children make good pupils, play was 
the school of sociality, of art, of religion. For a mystic, such 
as Froebel was, all things were possible, but the practical inter- 
ferences of his later disciples with the naivete and the spon- 
taneity of the child-nature have marred altogether the best 
ideas the master had. The wooden and modelled activity of 
so many kindergartens to-day is far from the ideal of him who 
said ' the unconsciousness of the child is rest in God,' for we 
may be sure he would have been the first himself to declare 
'the play of the child is activity in God.' Being a German, 
Froebel failed to prevent the workaday world of his own time 
from casting its shadow over the light of his inspiration. Had 



14 THE CHILD 

he been born an Englishman, the ' occupations ' and certain 
other features of his system, which even to-day his followers 
lack the courage to abandon, might have been conspicuous by 
their absence. Froebel created a ' garden ' for the children, it 
is true, but not in all respects was it superior to the unofficered 
' Paradise ' of Gutsmuths. The latter was more English-minded 
so far as play per se is concerned, and did not let the exigencies 
of life carry him so far from the cardinal thought of Schiller, 
'man is wholly man only when he plays.' One can hardly 
help wishing that Gutsmuths had been gifted by the Muses, or 
that Froebel had never heard the hum of toil or the whisper- 
ings of metaphysics. 

Colozza on Play Phenomeita. — The psychology and peda- 
gogy of play form the subjects of a recent volume by Pro- 
fessor G. A. Colozza, whose views may be thus summarised : 
Play is the superfluity of energy over and above the essential 
needs of hfe, — at once the equivalent of accumulated energy 
and the means of its augmentation. In the Uttle child the 
need to play increases in proportion as it plays ; the more it 
plays, the more it wishes to play. But mere superfluity of 
energy is not alone sufficient to produce play. Besides this 
superfluity of energy there must be also a more or less high 
degree of psychic activities. Those animals play the most 
who have this reserve capital, together with this psychic 
activity. Out of the great struggle for existence has come 
this happy faculty of play. The young of all animals play — 
their infancy is a time of joy and gladness, the age of play. 
As we go up the scale of Hfe, the development of play from 
the indefinite to the definite, from the homogeneous to the 
heterogeneous, follows the general law of physical and psychi- 
cal evolution — from the lower animals to the higher, from the 
higher vertebrates to the human child, from the savage child 
to the civilised child. The great human factors^mitation 
and imagination — play a most important role in child-amuse- 
nTenTTbut from the struggle for life survive also the love of 
victory, the instinct for conquest, the need of fighting, all of 
which express themselves in certain plays and games : ' the 
chess-player,' e.g., 'without knowing it, obeys to-day the in- 
stinct of conquest of his ancestors.' In later childhood a 
rather large role must be assigned to deliberate invention and 
fiction, and to what may euphemistically be termed ' the 



THE MEANING OF YOUTH AND PLAY 1 5 

pleasures of the imagination.' Play is a great social stimulus : 
' The lively pleasure which is felt in play is the prime motive 
which unites children. Child-societies are play-societies. 
Collective play is play par excelkfice. In it every child is 
spectator and actor, and experiences a variety of feelings and 
emotions — satisfaction, pride, triumph, emulation, etc. In 
collective life arise divers varied relations, from which come 
the correlative feelings which stimulate child activity to express 
itself according to this or that pleasurable emotion.' In play, 
too, occurs the first development of art, of the esthetic instinct 
in the child; and here, as with the savage, ornament some- 
times precedes utility. There are many games in which 
dressing, personal adornment and the like are the chief factors. 
Then, when music is added to the child's possessions, a new 
series of plays appears, in which rhythm, cadenced sounds, 
singings dancing, etc., fill out the round of pleasurable expres- 
sion ; with the children of the poor, the noise made by 
knocking two stones together serves in lieu of the musical 
luxuries of the rich. The surroundings of childhood — physical, 
psychical, social, historical, artistic — exert considerable influ- 
ence upon the plays and games of the human young, as Boc- 
cardo, Fornari and Perodi have noted. A peasant's child in 
the Apennines is differently encompassed from an American 
child in one of the New World's big, bustling cities, with all 
its wonders of modern skill and invention. Seasons, and 
climates too, are modifying factors, as also are country and 
city, riches and poverty, religion and politics, militarism and 
industrialism. Puppet-shows are unknown to some peoples, 
and to very many children, while many others are largely con- 
tent with language-plays. The ' mathematical recreations ' of 
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may be compared 
with the political and commercial aspects of many of the 
parlour-games of the present day. The stimulative role of 
child-play is remarkable : ' If the progress of the mind is 
determined by increase of the products of experience, child- 
play has an indubitable value. The experiences of the child 
almost always take the form of play ; in childhood, to play is 
synonymous with to experiment. Every new play is a new 
experience, and this, in its turn, gives rise to new knowledge, 
new feelings, new desires, new acts, and new abilities.' Play 
and playthings can serve as excellent culture-implements — the 



1 6 THE CHILD 

memory (as in word-games, repetition-games), the feelings and 
afieetions (as in many of the animal-games and social plays), 
the sex and domestic instincts (dolls and allied playthings), are 
all subject to influence and education. In a word, 'the 
plays of childhood are a microcosm possessing almost all the 
elements of life. Amour propre^ self-confidence, courage, 
astuteness, order, command, obedience, all are there.' The 
infinitude of child-play is capable of exciting any feeling or 
emotion. As Mme. Kergomard says : ' Play is the child's 
labour, its trade, its life, its initiation into society' (120, pp. 8, 
47, 65, 91, 216). 

redagogically much is implied by the facts that idiots are 
not playful, and that the wisest of men is not wise enough to 
command the games of children. The marionettism of 
extreme Froebelians, the neglect or despisal of invention pre- 
valent in certain kindergartens, the fetishism of the ' gifts,' the 
namby-pambyism of not a few doll-cults, the caricatured 
savagery of toy-soldierdom, the baneful luxury of the elegant 
])laythings of many of the rich, servile imitation (the refuge of 
idle and careless parents) — all these are enemies to the real 
educative aspects of child-play, which has need of continual 
'becoming,' of motion, life, the natural, invention, creation, 
all the progressive factors of human existence and human 
activities. The two pedagogic laws formulated by Colozza, as 
a result of his study of play, are these : ' {^a) the teacher must 
not urge on too quickly the appearance of play; {b) when 
children are tired of carrying on a given play, the teacher 
ought not always to let them have absolute rest, but should 
enable them to carry on plays of a different sort.' The first 
necessity for the proper exercise of the play-instinct in a child 
is a maximum of child-activity with a minimum of adult inter- 
ference. In connection with the discussion of the place of 
play in pedagogy, another study by Colozza — 'The Power of 
Inhibition' — is also well worth reading. The author, whose 
point of view is that reflection is not a cause, but the result of 
tile power of inhibition or arrest, physiologically considered, 
and that the human will is quite capable of being educated, 
appeals to teachers and the educators of modern society to 
make a greater use of this faculty, which, though in asceticism, 
with the exaggerated ideas of privation and mortification of 
body to save soul, or soul to save soul, it has been abused in 



T?IE MEANING OF YOUTH AND PLAY 1 7 

all lands and in all ages, yet has vast practical advantages in 
repressing and correcting the wild impulses and caprices of 
childhood, no less than the vagaries and inconsistencies of the 
individual members of normal human societies. 

Education by Play. — According to Miss, Lombroso : ' Play 
is for the child an occupation as serious, as important as study 
and work are for the adult ; play is, in fact, his means of 
development, and he needs to play, just as the silkworm needs 
continually to eat leaves' (369, p. 117). Indeed: 'All the 
impressions, sensations, scenes that throng around him, he 
needs to ruminate over, to turn about on every side^ to be their 
author and actor, in order to assimilate them, — all this he 
accomplishes by means of play.' Plays are 'the child's most 
original creation,' and they form for him a sort of gymnastic 
that helps to develop without fatiguing him, in which, too, he 
can exercise to the full the ' pleasure of explaining his own 
activity ' (so early prominent in childhood), his instinct of 
imitation, his power of imagination, and his life in the past of 
the race. The movement of play, 'which, at first sight, might 
seem a dissipation of much activity, really gives occasion for a 
more frequent respiration, and an exercise of muscular and 
pulmonary activity, by means of movements which fatigue him 
very little ; play is a real work of preparing the ground, which 
disappears with adolescence when the ground (the mind) is 
ready, broken, to receive the seed' (369, p. 171). Since play 
has special forms which favour muscular activity, mental alert- 
ness, imitation, imagination and invention, memory, language, 
— is, in fact, a sort of physical and psychical necessity — Miss 
Lombroso asks (369, p. 136) : 'And why not try in the schools 
a method of teaching by means of play (like the embryo-attempt 
in the institution cited by Perez) ? It is certain that from it 
would result for the child, besides a great physical pleasure, a 
real intellectual enjoyment; things would impress themselves 
upon his mind with an altogether different vivacity and fresh- 
ness than what he feels when he has to learn them by means 
of an arid and banal nomenclature.' But there is danger of 
too much adult interference here. 

Attempts at education through play are by no means new 
in the world. Froebel with his ' kindergarten,' Johnson with his 
'play-school,' and Tsanoff with his 'playground,' have all had 
their forerunners in the past among primitive peoples, or in 

B 



l8 THE CHILD 

philosophers and reformers of the earlier ages of mankind. 
Vittorino da Feltre (i 378-1446), the Abbot Melani (1748) and 
Jacopo StilUni (1669-1770) saw and utilised, as did Ferrante 
Aporte (i 791-1858) before Froebel, some of the pedagogical 
resources of play. And as Groos points out (253, p. 517), 
Boldicke, who found his inspiration in John Locke and Pastor 
Baratier, announced in his programme in 1732 the ' Locke- 
Baratieran method, i.e.^ 3. proposal, by the aid of play, music, 
poetry, and other enjoyable things (in which can be presented 
the most important truths), so to educate (to the glory of the 
Creator), within twelve years, ten superior boys, that in their 
fifteenth year they will understand German, Latin, French, 
Italian and English, and be able to demonstrate the most 
important truths from the first principles of world-wisdom.' 
The riddle-plays of Basedow are also cited. Groos recalls 
the fact that in 1776 Schlosser had emphasised the distinction 
between work and play, which was the problem of the school, 
imitation and play serving as preparation for earnest work of 
later years among primitive peoples, where work and natural 
instincts are not so dissonant as in civilisation, where the 
change is to earnest, persistent activity, not attractive in itself, 
but a necessity for survival. But there is a good deal in the 
view expressed by Dr D. G. Brinton : ' The measure of value 
of work is the amount of play there is in it, and the measure 
of value of play is the amount of work there is in it ' (78, p. 11 7). 
To deprive instruction of all the charm of play is not to be 
thought of; for, as Dr Groos observes, the rapprochements 
between play and work are such that the highest and noblest 
form of work lies very close to play in its possession of that 
delight in activity, which is the chief characteristic of play. 
The great point here, as elsewhere, is not to allow, as, e.g.^ 
Froebel and his successors, especially in their children's songs, 
seem to have done, the really naive to disappear or become 
atrophied beyond possibility of evocation for its natural employ- 
ment (253, p. 520). Absolute non-interference, non-direction, 
non-stimulation of the play of children by parents or teachers 
is, according to Groos, ' not merely injurious, but unnatural ' ; 
for, as the history of animal and hum.an life tells us, ' the 
parents are for some time the natural playmates of their off- 
spring,' and play with young children has a natural attraction 
for almost every normal human being. Parents and teachers. 



THE MEANING OF YOUTH AND PLAY 1 9 

therefore, have a natural right 'to stimulate play in general, to ad- 
vance the useful and the good, and to suppress the injurious and 
the immoral in play.' But never must the ndive^ the spontaneous 
be allowed to become the vapidly mechanical. The English 
proverb, ' All work and no play, makes Jack a dull boy,' and 
the saying of Jean Paul (253, p. 521), 'I am afraid of every 
adult, hairy hand and fist, that paws in among this tender pollen 
of child-flowers, shaking off here one colour, there another, so 
as to produce the right variegated carnation,' should be inscribed 
conspicuously in every home and in every school. That not a 
few children ' hate work,' has been made much of by certain 
writers, some of whom attribute it to atavism, the young human 
reproducing the condition of the young race. Riccardi (537, 
p. 161), who has investigated the predilections of Italian school- 
children for study and manual work, finds males in all classes 
of society more frequently without preferences, and less given 
to study and work than females, facts which seem to be ata- 
vistic. Work is therefore largely enforced. 

Work a?td Civilisatmt. — Work is one of the greatest con- 
quests of man. Says Ferrero : 'Man does not love work — 
work of muscle or work of brain. I am almost tempted to say 
that the habit of work is one of the most striking phenomena 
of human psychology.' Not alone the distaste which savages 
and primitive peoples generally (the author thinks) proves this, 
but also the very terms for work in all languages : Hebrew, 
assab (work^ pain) ; Greek, irUofiai (I strive, work, suffer) ; Latin, 
labor (work, pain) ; Italian, travaglio (suffering — c.f. French, 
travail, work). The mythic side of the same idea is found in 
the Semitic story of the origin of work as a punishment for 
disobedience in Eden — a view paralleled all over the world in 
the legends of other races who have sought an explanation for 
the necessity and the disagreeableness of labour (199, p. 13, 
p. 24). 

Through the long effort of ages, as Ferrero remarks, civilisa- 
tion has inculcated the majority of men with a habit of muscular 
labour, but this brilliant achievement has come by way of 
slavery, poverty, and the scaffold. Even now, however, whole 
classes of the community exist ' who toil not, neither do they 
spin ' — whose every effort is directed toward the task of avoiding 
work — criminals, prostitutes, vagabonds — classes that, when 
they do labour, exert themselves only in the most primitive. 



20 THE CHILD 

atavistic fashion. And the same ' law of least effort ' is known 
to the best of men. Not so successful, however, has civilisation 
been in its conquest of the habit of mental work, for here the 
law of least effort has uncounted paths to travel and innumer- 
able by-ways and nooks to explore, and the law of mental 
inertia finds unending novelties of dissipation. And the civil- 
ised human child is averse to work, like the savage. 

Ferrero, who holds (an unjustifiable generalisation upon 
present evidence) that 'the moral quality which chiefly dis- 
tinguishes the savage and the barbarian from the civilised man 
of the nineteenth century is violence of character ' (primitive 
man is 'an extremely violent animal '), while 'the fundamental 
characteristics of the civilised man of the nineteenth century 
are serenity and equanimity,' thinks that 'the habit of regular 
and methodical work has destroyed the violent impulsiveness 
of man's primitive character' — work subduing man by tiring 
him, and furnishing the basis of all ethics in the self-control 
which is the first condition of all morality. The uniformity 
and the regularity of work among civilised nations are one of the 
greatest triumphs of the evolution of the race. 

Play iji Savagery. — Vierkandt, contrasting the relative dis- 
connectedness of the impulses which go to make up the 
e7ise7nbk of savagery as compared with the systematisation of 
mental activity which marks the civilised man to-day (although 
this is, in reality, quite relative also), makes the generalisation 
— hazardous, unless well-interpreted — that the activity of the 
savage may be said to be play as against that organisation of 
culture exhibited by the highest races in historical times. It 
is evident, however, that Vierkandt underestimates the ' organi- 
sation ' (as opposed to ' play ') which really exists among 
savage and barbarous peoples, and, on the other hand, over- 
estimates the ' organised ' nature of modern civilisation. 

In connection with Vierkandt's views, we ought to take 
cognisance of the opinions of such eminent students of the 
plays and pastimes of primitive peoples as Culin, who, in his 
address as President of the American Folk-Lore Society, at 
Baltimore, 1897, said (134, p. 245) : 'Our ideas of a game are 
primarily associated with mirth, amusement, play, such indeed 
being the original meaning of our English word. A careful 
examination of games, however, reveals the fact that they 
originated, not as pastimes, but as serious divinatory contests. 



THE MEANING OF YOUTH AND PLAY 21 

This is especially true of the games of those we call primitive 
people, or savages. We quickly find that a distinction may 
be drawn between these sacred and divinatory games and the 
mimetic plays of children. . . . Children play at real games 
as they play at every other serious business of life. They thus 
perpetuate games that have otherwise disappeared. Hence the 
value of children's games in our study. At the same time, this 
observation applies chiefly to the higher cultures. In savagery 
we deal with the games of adults — first of men, then women 
— with games so complex that no child-mind could grasp their 
principles or objects ; with games so wrought and interwoven 
with primitive concepts of nature and the universe, that no 
modern mind could create or invent them.' 

The relation of play and work to the various arts and 
activities of human social life offers a wide field for investigation. 
Some have held that the fine arts are merely refined labour, 
others that they are labour geniaUsed by play. But even with 
primitive peoples it may often be that play is older than work, 
art than use (253, p. 56). 

From body movements, according to Karl Biicher in his 
interesting study of Work and Rhythm (87), sprang art — dance, 
music, poetry. The drama, the epic poem and the lyric are 
all developments from the 'primitive labour song,' which grew 
out of work done in time ■ or in concert, the earliest rhythms 
being labour-rhythms. The poet then was a ' maker ' in more 
senses than the Greek, who called the bard 'Troiro^g, ever dreamed 
of, for he was a 'worker' — labor piHmiim fecit poetani ; and he 
was born while music and the dance were still one. The 
children's song-game of to-day, ' Here I brew, here I bake,' 
carries us back to the childhood of the race, when, as Payot 
says of man's wiUing, his working was done with the co-opera- 
tion of all his faculties ; hands, body, voice, all bore their share 
in the task. 

Children's Games. — The collection of plays and games of 
children pubUshed by Mr W. W. Newell (456) and Mrs Gomme 
(246) contains innumerable examples of the child's reflection 
of the labours and duties of the past. These ' survivals ' and 
' parallehsms ' find recognition also in Groos, who, however, 
hardly enters upon the rich mine of primitive plays and games 
contained in the publications of the anthropologists of America. 

We must not, however, forget the great role of contemporary 



22 THE CHILD 

imitation by children of the deeds and actions of their elders, 
which is very strong indeed among some primitive peoples, as 
it is in our day. The following items from Rev. J. Owen 
Dorsey's excellent account of ' The Games of Teton Dakota 
Children ' (i 72, p. 329) serve to indicate that the weird and sacred 
things of aboriginal life and thought are not beyond the touch 
of the children. 

' Playing with small things ' — Shkdtapi chiK'dla — is the 
name of a Teton Dakota children's game, which none but girls 
can play. 'They imitate the actions of women, such as 
carrying dolls, women's work-bags, small tents, small tent-poles, 
wooden horses, etc., on their backs ; they pitch tents, cook, 
nurse children, invite one another to feasts,' etc. 

Another game played in the spring is called ' They make one 
another carry packs ' — Wak'm^ kichichiydpi — in which ' some 
boys or girls pretend to be horses, and carry packs.' Dr Dorsey 
informs us further : ' The children of each sex imitate their 
elders. When they pretend to dance the sun-dance, the boys 
cut holes in their shirts instead of their flesh, and through 
these holes are inserted the thongs which fasten them to the 
mock sun-pole.' 

These Indian boys and girls also play a 'Ghost game,' 
described as follows : — 

' One erects a lodge at a distance from the village, and at 
night he comes hooting like an owl, and scratching on the ex- 
terior of the tent where other children are seated. Sometimes 
the ghost whistles just as they imagine that ghosts do. Some 
ghosts whiten their faces and paint their bodies at random. 
Others put red paint around their eyes. All this is at night 
when their mothers are absent. Occasionally the children 
leave the village in order to play this game, going in a crowd 
to the designated place. Some ghosts whiten their bodies 
all over, painting themselves black between the ribs. When 
they do not whiten the whole face they cover the head with 
white paper, in which they punch eye-holes, around which 
they make black rings. The one acting the ghost tickles 
anyone whom he catches until the latter laughs very 
heartily.' 

Thus early do children learn that from the subHme to the 
ridiculous is but a step. 

Even the priests and shamans are imitated by the children 



THE MEANING OF YOUTH AND PLAY 23 

in the ' Mystery game ' — Wakan' shkdtapi — imitation of the 
wakan men and women : — 

' A small lodge is set up at a distance from the village, and 
in it is made a mystery feast, after which the wakan persons 
sing and give medicine to a sick person, some pretend to be 
gods {tawdshicMipi\ others claim to hear mysterious spirits 
which aid them in various ways. Some pretend to conjure 
with cacti. Others give love medicines to boys who wish to 
gain the love of girls, or to girls who wish to administer them 
to boys.' 

Dr J. W. Fewkes and Lieut. J. G. Owens, in their account 
of the Ld-ld^-kojt-ta, a woman's dance of the Tusayan 
Indians, say ^ : ' Each contestant in the race, as she entered the 
kib-va, passed to the altar, with the fireplace on her left, and 
then to Kwdts'-kd-2va, touching the crook which he held aloft. 
After all the runners had done the same, mothers brought 
their children, and made them follow the example of the 
runners.' 

Of the ' White deer dance' of the Hupa Indians, held 
every two years, Mr Woodruff says ^ : 'The men in this dance, 
as in all the others, are arranged according to size and age. 
The old men are in the centre, and the younger ones next, 
and on the flanks are the boys. It is customary to have two 
or three little boys, three or four years of age, in every kind of 
dance, and the , strenuous efforts made by those little tots to 
imitate their seniors are extremely comical.' 

Ferriani protests against a low and dangerous ideal of play 
for children ; unless it be a powerful physical and moral 
education, play is worse than work often is (202, p. 270) : 'No 
toys for sick children, no clown-gymnastics, no plays that 
occupy the mind of the child to even worse ends than the 
school-task, but plays in the open air, plays that set the muscles 
in motion, plays that incite emulation and courage, that act 
in compensatory fashion upon the nervous system, making 
the child bold, magnanimous, courteous to his fellows, and 
ingenious.' 

Nerve-shocking play and kindred experiences are bad for 

the child, 'whose whole nature,' to use the words of Moreau, 

'is extraordinarily nervous.' For this reason, Ferriani thinks 

that the effect of modern theatrical representation — the whole 

^ Amer. Anthrop., V. 123. 2 Amer. Atithrop.^ V 57. 



24 THE CHILD 

billowing sea of human passions rushing upon them at once, 
when robbed of their rightful sleep, and overwhelming them 
with a flood of new and hurtful sensations — upon young 
children cannot be other than bad, and the old puppet-shows, 
once so suited to little children, have taken on a solemn 
ultra-childhood aspect. Books and newspapers of certain 
classes lie under a like ban, and many sorts of tales and stories 
as well ; the saying of Horace, ' ridendo dicere verum^^ Ferriani 
remarks, ought never to be forgotten ; too mean and too high, 
too weak and too strong literature is alike of evil influence. 
There is a vast difference between child-literature and childish 
print or word of mouth ; the words and thoughts of a ' reduced 
adult ' are not necessarily those of a real child. With plays 
and books go often the first friends and companions of the 
child. One mistake, that it is very easy to talk to children, is 
about as commonly entertained as another, that it is exceed- 
ingly easy to write for them. The superficiality of parents, 
relatives, nurses, etc., is one of the great dangers to which 
childhood is exposed ; too often they neither know the child, 
nor are known of him. 

Principal Russell, in the admirable introduction which he 
has furnished to the collection of observations on Imitatio?i 
and Allied Activities^ published by the State Normal School at 
Worcester, Mass., has aptly described the role of play, which 
must have its course before the child can settle down to the 
work which is his later and serious occupation (291, p. xxii.) : 
' He casts about for an opening into the attractive activities 
that he sees going on in the adult world around him, and, 
reckoning perforce with his immaturity and impuissance, 
straightway adopts as the only profession possible to his small 
executive powers, the drama. The long-past achievements of 
his ancestors reverberate and tingle in his blood, impelling 
him to action : but all his efforts are ludicrously futile beside 
those of the giants about him, and meet only with indiffer- 
ence or jeers. The world of law and order and systematic 
endeavour is too tough for his assimilation. It must first be 
softened into myth and make-believe by the solvent juices of 
fancy, which the glands of his little mind fortunately pour out 
in abundance. He cannot live life; he must dramatise and 
play it. So he becomes an actor, an amateur in the good 
sense, — 



THE MEANING OF YOUTH AND PLAY 25 

Filling from time to time his humorous stage 
With all the persons, down to palsied age, 
That Life brings with her in her equipage. 

Thus in imitation play, in obedience to the biologic law of 
recapitulation, the child epitomises and rehearses the funda- 
mental experiences of the race, at the same time that he is 
sounding the depths and shoals of his own nascent powers, 
and thereby preparing day by day to take part in the real work 
of life which the coming years will bring. Play is thus seen to 
be at once reminiscent and anticipatory, a welding of the 
future to the past.' And all over this child's season of appren- 
ticeship, his Wanderjahre, is written, for the adult noli me tangere, 
let well enough alone. 

Groos's Theory of Play. — Professor Karl Groos, of Basel, 
who holds that ' the play of the young being once successfully 
solved, the play of the adult will offer no special difficulties,' 
maintains that 'the play of youth depends on the fact that 
certain instincts [with Ziegler and Weismann, Dr Groos refers 
all instincts to natural selection], especially useful in preserv- 
ing the species, appear before the animal seriously needs them. 
They are, in contrast with later serious exercise {Ausubimg), 
a preparation {VorUbung) and practice {Einiibu?ig) for the 
special instincts' (252, p. xx.). The biological significance of 
play seems to lie in the fact that ' perhaps the very existence 
of youth is due in part to the necessity for play ; the animal 
does not play because he is young, he has a period of youth 
because he must play.' According to Groos, 'the psychic ac- 
companiment of the most elementary of all plays, namely, 
experimentation, is "joy in being a cause,"' and the more 
subtle psychic phenomenon connected with the subject ' " make- 
believe," or "conscious self-illusion.'" Experimentation, 'the 
commonest of all kinds of play,' is to be looked upon as 
' the principal source of all kinds of art.' ' From experimenta- 
tion in general,' says Groos, 'three specialised forms of play 
arise, analogous to the human arts, and their differentiation 
leads us to the three most important principles of the latter. 
They are courtship, imitation, and the constructive arts, and 
the three principles involved are those of self-exhibiuon, imita- 
tion and decoration. These principles are expressed in art as 
the personal, the true, and the beautiful. There is no form of 



26 



THE CHILD 



art in which they are not present together, though one usually 
dominates, while the others are subsidiary. This is evident 
even in the animal world' (252, p. 327). The following table 
exhibits in outline, how, according to Groos, ' all forces effi- 
cacious in artistic production are referable to the central idea 
of play, and, therefore, to an instinctive foundation ' — out of 
instinct springs play, out of play develops art : — 



PLAY. 

Experimen ta tio7t . 

{Joy in being able.) 

{Pretence : Conscious self-deception.) 



Self-Exhibition. 
The Personal. 


Imitation. 
The True. 


Decoration. 
The Beautiful. 


With /Courtship 
Animals ( arts. 

I^Dance with 
1 excitement. 
With Man-< Music. 
Lyric 
^ poetry. 


■ Imitative arts. 

Imitative dance. 

Pantomime. 

Sculpture. 

Painting. 

Epic poetry. 

Drama. 


Building arts. 

Ornamental ion. 
Architecture. 



The Real Significance of Play. — This scheme is, doubtless, 
imperfect, as critics of Groos's book have taken occasion 
to point out, but the idea which underlies it all is a most sug- 
gestive and illuminating one, when rightly understood. In his 
latest work on the play of man, which has recently appeared, 
Groos makes clear this point (253, p. 492), when he observes : 
' I presuppose everywhere the existence of innate impulses 
(Triebe), and assume that these have only led to play-exercise 
(Spielende Uebiing) through the organisation of a period of youth. 
Play will, in general, serve more to tone down {abschwcichen) in- 
stincts already present than to strengthen them or create 
entirely new ones.' In his two books Groos has gathered 
together a vast amount of material in support of this theory, 
which certainly possesses many merits not belonging to others 



THE MEANING OF YOUTH AND PLAY 2J 

in the field. Youth was furnished in the order of natural 
development to the animal as a means of utilising and con- 
trolling the wealth of innate instincts and impulses in a new 
and higher fashion. In a word, animals, and man especially, 
possess youth because it was necessary to create art (and 
civilisation) from instincts through the transforming power of 
play. "^Childhood is the period in which, by the eminently 
supple and attractive instrument of play, the natural instincts 
and impulses, so exuberant and so far-reaching, make possible 
the normal, healthy, active, ingenious, self-knowing and self- 
trusting adult. Youth has made possible the passnge from the 
unconsciousness of instinct to the art of civihsation, and play 
survives sufficiently even in adult life to prevent this art 
degenerating into a mere mechanism. Just as helplessness 
in infancy is the guarantee of adult intellect, play in youth is 
the guarantee of adult morality and culture. The prolonga- 
tion of infancy in the human race needed as a corollary the 
activity of youth to secure the wisdom and the strength of 
mature life. Play may be termed the genius side of instinct, 
and youth its inspirer. Man had to be young to be civilised ; 
had he no youth and no play he were perpetually a savage. 

Play, in childhood, as Groos has abundantly shown, is 
concerned with everything ; emotions, feelings, acts, thoughts, 
imaginings, speech, all begin their career under its subtle, 
shaping influence, and the really genial among adults never 
lose in science, art, literature, the 'play,' which makes it a joy 
to be alive and to use life. Language, poetry, art, science, all 
begin in child-play; the orator, the poet, the artist, the seeker 
after knowledge ' play ' as surely and as ?idively as the child. 





ESKIMO CHILD. 
{YiomRep. U.S. Bur. of E due, 1894.) 



CHAPTER III 

THE RESEMBLANCES OF THE YOUNG 

The Resemblances- of the Embryo. — In his Observations on the 
Developmental History of Atiimals (i8, I. p. 224), the first 
part of which was pubUshed in 1828, Dr E. von Baer, after 
stating that his investigations revealed the fact that ' in the 
embryo the general characters developed first, the less general 
later, the special last of all,' goes on to say that 'the embryo 
of a higher animal form is never really like any other [adult] 
animal form, but resembles its embryo only.' He regarded 
it as ' not yet proved that every embryo of a higher animal 
form must gradually pass through the lower animal forms ' 
(p. 220). The more diverse, also, two animal forms are, 'the 
farther back we have to go in the history of their development 
to discover a coincidence.' 

Commenting upon these views, Professor F. M. Balfour 
(25, p. 2) remarks : ' Von Baer was mistaken in thus absolutely 
limiting the generalisation, but his statement is much more 
nearly true than a definite statement of the exact similarity 
of the embryos of higher forms to the adults of lower ones.' 
The embryo of man is vastly more like the embryos of the 
anthropoid apes than like the adult apes, but we can be 
certain that the old apes have varied very much from the 
more human type of their embryos, succeeding also in becom- 
ing much different from adult man at the same time. The 
nearness of the young anthropoid to the young human 
decreases continually with age, and the old anthropoid is 
entirely lacking in many of the human characteristics which 
his foetal life and early infancy seemed to promise as per- 
manent possessions. 

The Young Ape and the Human Infant. — In his discussion of 
the skulls of men and apes in 1869, Dr Rudolf Virchow 
remarked : ' The resemblance of the young apes to human 

29 



30 THE CHILD 

children is very much greater than that of the old apes with 
grown and fully-developed men. The mother who calls her 
child a " little monkey," involuntarily gives evidence of the 
fact that the human infant has in or about it certain animal 
traits. Nowhere does the analogy manifest itself more strongly 
than just in the construction of the skull. The small size and 
forward projection of the facial bones (those of the jaw 
especially), the more deUcate formation of the eye and its 
surroundings, the smooth arching of the roof of the skull, 
the general form of the cranium, the relation of the individual 
skull-vertebrae with one another bring the head of the young 
ape so close to that of the child, that the resemblance is 
startlingly great. But with every month and year of life the 
skull of even the most human-like apes becomes more unlike 
that of man' (667, p. 22). It is in the direction, of the massive 
jaw and its strength of bony framework that the energy of 
growth in the gorilla's skull is expended — the brain of the 
apes growing least of all. While the hugest ape has almost 
the teeth of an ox, he has only the brain of a child. Evi- 
dently, therefore, ' no man could ever arise through the 
continuous development of the ape.' The lowest monkeys, 
e.g., the ouistiti, a little creature inhabiting the east of Brazil, 
exhibit a greater human likeness in the bony structure of the 
head than do the anthropoid apes. Virchow pointed out also 
that in the duration and rapidity of development, both of the 
whole individual and of his several parts, there exists a marked 
difference between the apes and man. The apes have in 
general a short life and a rapid development, and are born 
in a condition of bodily and mental maturity more resembling 
that of animals lower in the scale of nature than that of man — 
the highest apes attain, at most, their full growth and develop- 
ment, while man remains as yet in the early bloom of youth, 
and are sexually mature before man has passed out of 
childhood. Not only does the second dentition occur far 
earlier in the apes than in man, but even before its 
estabHshment the full development of brain has, as a rule, 
already taken place in the former, while with the latter, what 
may be termed its essential development has hardly yet begun. 
Virchow admits, however, with Vogt and others, that the 
skulls and brains of microcephalic congenital idiots present 
a much greater resemblance to those of the apes than the 
corresponding parts and organs of intelligent, well-developed 



THE RESEMBLANCES OF THE YOUNG 3 1 

men, but prefers to consider these peculiarities (the relatively 
greater development of the bones of the face and the jaw, e.g.) 
as arrests of development affecting one region of the body 
only ; the rest of the body, generally, is so thoroughly human 
as not at all to justify the term ' ape-men ' which has often 
been applied to these microcephalic idiots. It is in the latest 
and most complicated acquisition of the human race, the 
brain and the finer development of the face that these 
microcephalic idiots are lacking, while they possess many 
other peculiarities which no ape has ever inherited or 
acquired. So also with human monsters and malformations 
whose congenital departures from the normally human cause 
them at times to resemble in striking fashion in some limited 
organ or portion of the body certain of the lower animals, 
and Geofifroy Saint-Hilaire was as justified in calling the 
children born altogether or partly limbless phocofnele^ as was 
Vogt in styling the microcephalic idiots, ' ape-men.' We must 
be careful to distinguish the evolutional identities and like- 
nesses from the accidental coincidences and resemblances. 

Hartmann, in his work on the Anthropoid Apes (289, p. 
301), quotes, approvingly, the words of Vogt : ' When we 
consider the principles of the modern theory of evolution, 
as it is applied to the history of development, we are met 
by the important fact that in every respect the young ape 
stands nearer to the human child than the adult ape does 
to the adult man. The original differences between the young 
creatures of both types are much slighter than in their adult 
condition : this assertion, made long since, in my lectures on 
the human race, has received a striking confirmation from 
recent autopsies of young anthropoids which have died in 
the Zoological Gardens of Europe. In proportion to the 
age of the specimen, the characteristic differences in the form 
of the jaw, the cranial ridges, etc., become more evident. 
Both man and apes are developed from an embryonic 
condition, and from the period of childhood in a diverging 
or almost opposite direction into the final type of their 
species, yet even adult apes still retain in their whole organisa- 
tion features which correspond to those of the human child.' 

Effects of Age. — Havelock Ellis, in his masterly study of 
Man and Woman (183, p. 23), makes clear the implication 
carried by these facts : ' The ape starts in life with a consider- 
able human endowment, but in the course of life falls far 



32 THE CHILD 

away from it ; man starts in life with a still greater portion 
of human or ultra-human endowment, and to a less extent 
falls from it in adult life, approaching more and more to the 
ape.' In other v/ords, with age the ape loses the compara- 
tively human character of his infancy, and man, in like 
manner, the comparatively ultra-human character of his early 
childhood. Foetal life is largely upward evolution, develop- 
ment after birth largely ' a concrete adaptation to the environ- 
ment, without regard to upward zoological movement.' As 
Mr Ellis says : ' It seems that up to birth, or shortly 
afterwards, in the higher mammals, such as the apes and 
man, there is a rapid and vigorous movement along the line 
of upward zoological evolution, but that a time comes when 
this foetal or infantile development ceases to be upward, but 
is so directed as to answer to the life-wants of the particular 
species, so that henceforth and through life there is chiefly a 
development of lower characters, a slow movement towards 
degeneration and senility, although a movement that is 
absolutely necessary to ensure the preservation and stability 
of the individual and the species.' Thus is the child the 
' father of the man,' and the ' Fall,' if there be one for the 
race, is in the descent from the high promise of childhood to 
the comparative barrenness of senility. 

The present writer has heard Professor E. H. Russell, of the 
State Normal School at Worcester, Mass., interpret in the 
light of Havelock Ellis's statements the lines in Wordsworth's 
great ode : — 

' Shades of the prison-house begin to close 
Upon the growing boy,' 

and it is in this sense that we may interpret many of the poets 
and philosophers who have sung and written of ' the golden 
age of childhood,' ' the heaven of infancy,' from the forgotten 
bards of antiquity down to Swinburne, who never tires of 
hymning ' the immortal Godhead incarnate in the mortal and 
transitory presence of infancy.' 

Some Resemblances in Age. — A possible use for the retention 
of some of the characteristic resemblances of all the races in 
their childhood, may occur in the so-called ' Resemblances 
between Husband and Wife,' lately studied by M. Fol. It is 
a matter of ancient remark that old married couples seem to 
look like each other, and the commonly-received explanation 



THE RESEMBLANCES OF THE YOUNG 



33 



of the phenomenon is that constant companionship, common 
interests, common acts, uniformity of life and the Hke have 
produced the result in question. According to M. Hermann 
Fol, however, the case is quite different, and the resemblances 
of aged married couples spring neither from this source, nor 
from the supposed general tendency of old people to look 
alike, a factor which the more primitive milieu of the aged 
and their more primitive habits among civilised races accen- 
tuate, perhaps, since with savage and barbarous peoples these 
same resemblances are said to be very marked. Both the 
tendency of the old to look alike and the power of conjugal 
life to profoundly modify, if not altogether to abolish, initial 
differences, seem to have been assigned an exaggerated role. 
Fol examined the photographs of 251 couples (personally 
unknown to him) very carefully with respect to resemblances 
between husband and wife. The results are exhibited in the 
following table : — 



Number of Couples. 


Per cent, of 
Resemblances. 


Per cent, of 
Non-Resemblances. 


Young, . .198 
Old, . . .53 


66.66 
71.70 


33-33 
28.30 



It would appear, therefore, that the resemblances between 
husband and wife in old age are not due to the assimilating 
forces of conjugal life, but the result of resemblances existing 
at the time of marriage ; in other words, people are led to 
marry according to the law of conformities and not according 
to that of contrasts, the mutual attraction is what the lovers 
have in common, not that in which they differ. The love- 
period in man has often been styled his ' second childhood,' 
and there is something of truth lurking behind the wit in 
the phrase. In a sense, physically and mentally, as children 
all over the world resemble each other, so, at the great selec- 
tive epochs of human existence, it is the Hkenesses that cast 
the die. If one might, somewhat hazardously, generalise, 
just as the play wherein all children so resemble each other 
changes to art which causes so many resemblances between its 
devotees, so genius in like manner represents the common 
intellectual capacity of children, and the hkenesses among the 

c 



34 THE CHILD 

so-called classes and groups of mankind in their adult expression 
are caused by the persistence of the resemblances of childhood 
and not by the abolition of antecedent differences. Woman, 
moreover, is nature's attempt to preserve the child, generally, 
in the adult, while genius must not infrequently represent her 
still rarer effort to do so in the other sex. One might add 
to the declaration of the great Chinese sage that 'genius is 
the preservation of the pure ideas of childhood,' that art 
is the preservation of the play of childhood, science of its 
curiosity, invention of its fancy, religion of its faith — and 
geniuses, artists, scientists, inventors, the pious, resemble one 
another in their respective groups more through what they have 
retained of the universality of childhood than through the 
particularities acquired in the passage to manhood. Here 
the child is 'father of the man,' and the 'consciousness of 
kind ' (to use Professor Giddings's well-known term, which is 
nothing more than another turn of the old saw, ' birds of a 
feather flock together '), which plays so large a 7'dle in later life, 
is but the effort of the kinship of all childhood to perpetuate 
itself as far as possible everywhere, in adult life. .Childhood 
possesses the kinship of heredity ; manhood, except in genius 
and in w^oman, and scantly elsewhere among the races, bears 
the marks of environmental influence, strong enough all too 
often to create striking dissimilarities j and intellect, the latest 
acquisition of the race, suffers most. Children, in fact, are 
born, adults made. 

Racial Resemblances of the Human Child. — Man, like other 
animals, is most teachable when he is a child, as appears from 
the fact that the children of all known races of man are, up to 
the period of puberty, perhaps, much more on a par as regards 
intelligence than adults of these various races, just as they are, 
in so many respects, more alike physically. 

Professor G. Flamingo, in the course of his article on 'The 
Conflict of Races, Classes and Societies' (205, p. 408), observes : 
'No white child was ever born with a greater intellectual 
development than that of a negro child.' This, Flamingo 
declares, follows from Flechsig's discovery that the nervous 
fibres of the brain in new-born children are almost entirely 
deprived of myelin, and whatever resemblance there is in this 
respect to the lower animals characterises both the negro and 
the v/hite child. Citing the statement of Fouillee that ' man 
in a state of nature is, like a child, a sensitive, impulsive being,' 



THE RESEMBLANCES OF THE YOUNG 35 

Fiamingo goes on to say : ' And yet the psychological a^tudes 
of the child born to civilised parents are enormously greater 
than those of the savage child. Exaggerating this fact, Mismer 
writes : " The child of an uncultivated race is obliged to learn 
everything, while the child of the civilised race has only to 
remember." It is then absurd to expect that a coloured man, 
brought into a civilised society of whites, should find himself 
completely adapted to his social environment and proceed to 
contribute to new scientific discoveries. Not only the psychical 
but even the physiological superiority of the white man has 
been slowly acquired.' 

Mr Benjamin Kidd (325, p. 295) says with reference to the 
African race in the United States : ' The children of the large 
negro population in [some parts of] that country, are on just 
the same footing as children of the white population in the 
public elementary school. Yet the negro children exhibit no 
intellectual inferiority; they make just the same progress in 
the subjects taught as do the children of white parents, and 
the deficiency they exhibit later in life is of quite a different 
kind.' This deficiency is largely moral and social and comes 
after puberty, and has not yet been shown to spring from 
intellectual defects — the negro runs much greater risk of be- 
coming a criminal than of being an idiot. Mr G. R. Stetson, 
who holds strictly to ' higher ' and ' lower ' races, cites, in the 
course of an article on ' The Educational Status of the Negro ' 
(616, p. 30), the following opinion of Mr E. Hyde of the 
Hampton Institute : ' During my trip in the South I was 
struck by the number of bright coloured boys and girls who 
were graduating from the grammar and high schools at 15 
or 16 years of age. The question was asked, "What is there 
for them to do? "and the reply was made that there is but 
little for them to do unless they are taught to work and become 
ambitious to learn trades.' It would appear then that the 
young negro is quite as capable as the white child of being 
crammed with Latin and Greek and the rest of the manifold 
curriculum of the day, and quite as likely to receive ' too much 
in the line of mere intellectual training.' 

Primitive Genius. — A youthful learned proletariat could 
almost as readily be produced among the blacks as among the 
whites. Dr F. Boas (60, p. 18), referring to the argument 
from skull-capacity to brain-size and intelligence [the group of 
individuals having capacities from 1450 to 1650 cc. includes 



36 THE CHILD 

55 per cent, of Europeans, 58 per cent, of African negroes 
and 58 per cent, of Melanesians ; while 50 per cent, of 
whites, 32 per cent, of Melanesians and 27 per cent, of 
negroes have capacities above 1550 cc], observes: 'We 
might, therefore, anticipate a lack of men of great genius, but 
should not anticipate any great lack of faculty among the great 
mass of negroes living among whites and enjoying the advan- 
tages of the leadership of the best men of that race.' The 
social gap is more noxious than the intellectual gap. The 
history of Bornu, in Africa, as Dr Boas suggests, puts the 
negro forward in his best Hght, and may reasonably be 
compared with the achievements of negro children in white 
schools. So, too, with the American Indian. An Arizona 
Congressman is reported to have said, ' There is as much hope 
of educating the Apache as there is of educating the rattle- 
snake on which he feeds.' But Mr O. B. Super (622, p. 235), 
writing in 1895, informs us that the resident physician at the 
Indian School at Carlisle, Pa., is Ur Carlos Montezuma, a full- 
blooded Apache, who, working his way through school, gradu- 
ated at the age of twenty-three from the Chicago Medical 
College, and has since his appointment performed the duties 
of his office in an eminently satisfactory manner. Even more 
remarkable is the career of Dr Oronhyatekha, a Canadian 
Mohawk, college graduate, physician, and at present the head 
of the great secret society of ' Foresters.' But with Tecumseh, 
Red Jacket, Nez Perce Joseph, King Phihp and other great 
men, the Indian race hardly needs to plead its possession of 
intellect. As Captain Pratt, the Superintendent of the Carlisle 
School, once said, ' The great difference between us and the 
Indian is a difference in opportunities.' Dr Montezuma has 
perhaps struck the keynote of the whole matter when he says, 
' My case is exceptional only in so far as I have received 
exceptional treatment' If the right opportunity is offered, the 
right appeal made, the Indian can, and does, respond. The 
number of Indian physicians, clergymen and athletes already 
educated and active in North America, to say nothing of 
politicians and statesmen in the Republics of Central and 
South America, seems to indicate some lines along which these 
aborigines can readily and highly develop themselves. So 
eminent an authority as Dr. D. G. Brinton has said (77, p- 15) : 
' The question has often been considered whether the mental 
powers of the savage are distinctly inferior. This has been 



THE RESEMBLANCES OF THE YOUNG 37 

answered by taking the children of savages when quite young 
and bringing them up in civilised surroundings. The verdict 
is unanimous that they display as much aptitude for the 
acquisition of knowledge, and as much respect for the precepts 
of morality, as the average English or German boy or girl, but 
with less originality or "initiative." I have been in close 
relations to several full-blood American Indians who had been 
removed from an aboriginal environment and instructed in this 
manner, and I could not perceive that they were either in 
intellect or sympathies inferior to the usual type of the Ameri- 
can gentleman. One of them notably had a refined sense of 
humour, as well as uncommon acuteness of observation.' 

Mr Kidd assails the celebrated Damara-dog comparison 
of Galton's by citing the remarkable intellectual progress made 
by children of the Australian aborigines, who are, ' by the 
common consent of the civilised world, placed intellectually 
almost at the bottom of the list of the existing races composing 
the human family . . . the zero from which ethnologists have 
long reckoned our intellectual progress upwards' (325, p. 294). 
' It is somewhat startling, for instance,' says Mr Kidd, 'to read 
that in the Australian colonies it has been observed that 
aboriginal children learn quite as easily and rapidly as children 
of European parents, and, lately, that for three consecutive 
years the aboriginal school at Remahyack, in Victoria, stood 
highest of all the State schools of the colony in examination 
results, obtaining too per cent, of marks.' Rev. John Mathew 
(415a), whom Mr Kidd cites on this point, observes further: 
' It is astonishing how easily and completely young blacks, not 
cut off from intercourse with their relatives, but 'living and 
working constantly among the whites, fall into European modes 
of thought.' The limit of the native's range of mental de- 
velopment, Mr Mathew thinks, ' is soon reached ' — lack of 
apphcation, want of stability and capricious morals characteris- 
ing them later in Hfe, together with inordinate vanity and love 
of praise. Here, again, it is not in sheer intellect that the 
aboriginal child is deficient, but in the other faculties of a 
stable manhood. From long experience with the Australian 
natives, Mr Edward Stephens (614a) entertains a very favourable 
opinion of their capacity for mental improvement; and ob- 
serves, in addition : ' I say fearlessly that nearly all their evils 
they owed to the white man's immorality and to the white man's 
drink.' Something about the futile and ill-considered attempts 



38 THE CHILD 

to civilise the aborigines of Australia, as well as about the good 
results of certain other efforts, may be read in Dr Thompson's 
Moraviati Missions (637, pp. 415-451). The school at Ramah- 
yuck (Remahyack) is a Moravian establishment, which, in 1874, 
was ranked by the Government inspector ' highest on the list 
of rudimentary schools in the Province of Victoria ' ; and the 
arrowroot cultivated by the natives secured a prize at the 
Melbourne Exhibition and a prize medal at Vienna. At 
another Moravian school, at Ebenezer, mention is made of ' a 
boy of eight, who had been caught less than two years before, 
at which time he knew not a word of English, and had never 
seen a book, but now could read tolerably well, and had made 
fair progress in all elementary branches, writing included.' 
Of the natives in other parts of the country, we are told ' many 
have acquired ease and correctness in the use of the EngHsh 
language, have become skilled riders and superior shepherds.' 
Of the adult Australian Mr Stephens takes a comparatively 
high view, describing a full-blooded native of his acquaintance 
as ' an agreeable com.panion, interesting in conversation, full 
of anecdote and adventure.' 

This mental capacity of the children of aboriginal people, 
seen in Australia amid so many disadvantageous factors of 
environment, is still more in evidence in its own milieu. Very 
interesting in this connection are the experiences of mission- 
aries with their phonetic alphabets for recording primitive 
languages and teaching the natives to read and write. Mr J. 
C. Pilling 1 tells us that the Cherokee child learns to read and 
write in two and a half months, the average Cree child learns 
to read fluently in a few weeks. Precocity in learning to read 
and write, even with our unphonetic and cumbersome system 
of EngUsh spelling, has been again and again reported in 
Indian children. 

This precocity of childhood may be said to characterise 
all the known races of man, and to be even more marked the 
more primitive the race. On this point, ' It is an interesting 
fact,' says Havelock Ellis (183, p. 177), 'and perhaps of some 
significance, that among primitive races in all parts of the 
world, the children, at an early age, are very precocious in 
intelligence.' And again, ' It seems that, the lower the race, 
the more marked is this precocity, and its arrest at puberty. 
It is a fact that must be taken in connection with the peculiarly 
^ Amer. Anthrop., VI. p. 184. 



THE RESEMBLANCES OF THE YOUNG 39 

human character of the youthful anthropoid apes and the more 
degraded morphological characters of the adults.' The same 
writer cites from Lord Wolseley the following a propos of the 
Fantis, an African tribe: 'The boy is far brighter, quicker, 
and cleverer than the man. You can apparently teach the 
boy anything until he reaches puberty; then he becomes 
duller and more stupid, more lazy and more useless every 
day ' ; and Leclere has said something similar of the Cam- 
bodians. But over against these statements we can set the 
corresponding (though less marked) phenomena of puberty in 
our own races — 'the silly years,' for an arrest of mental de- 
velopment actually seems to take place — and the law of 
retardation which apparently governs the achievements of the 
human being outside the bounds of childhood. The child 
grows fast, learns fast, lives fast, in a sense, at least. 

Powers of Early Childhood. — What has been called the 
' law of rapid activity ' is perhaps the most marked character- 
istic of growing childhood as compared with adult age. 'This 
rapidity of action,' says Dr Alvarez (5, p. 18), 'marks the 
child, from the smallest organic action to the highest psychic 
acts and voluntary movements,' and even characterises him in 
perturbed as well as normal functionality, in health, and in 
disease. In childhood we see rapidity of nutrition, circula- 
tion, respiration, digestion, secretion, pain, pleasure. Like his 
griefs and his joys, the child's diseases and maladies evolve 
quickly, and the remedies are quickly absorbed, do their work, 
and are eliminated. 

Here, too, Hes, in great part, the explanation of the wonder- 
ful progress in acquisitive development of early childhood, and 
the remarkable decrease which characterises the human in- 
dividual later on in life. This relative decrease of progress 
has been noted by various writers, from Tiedemann, the father 
of 'child-psychology,' in 1787, down to the present time. 
Egger sums up the facts in these words (181, p. 12) : 'In the 
first period of its life, the child's progress is marked from day 
to day, then from week to week, then from month to month, 
then from year to year.' To this statement he adds: 'The 
age when the mind has as yet no teacher (properly understood) 
is perhaps that in which it learns the most and the quickest '• — 
the number of new ideas acquired during this period (from 
birth to about five or six years) as compared with the achieve- 
ments of later life is indeed remarkable. 



40 THE CHILD 

Genius. — In spite of the objections of some psychologists, 
there is much truth in the saying of Goethe, ' If children grew 
up according to early indications, we should have nothing but 
geniuses'; and all the play of environment since the race 
began has not removed the fact emphasised by Schopenhauer, 
' Every child is to a certain extent a genius, and every genius 
is to a certain extent a child.' ' Genius,' says Mr C. H. 
Cooley in a recent essay (126, p. 317), 'is that aptitude for 
greatness that is born in a man. Fame is the recognition by 
men that greatness has been achieved. Between the two lie 
early nurture and training, schools, the influence of friends and 
books, opportunities, and, in short, the whole working of 
organised society upon the individual. One is biological, the 
other social ; to produce geniuses is a function of race, to 
allot fame is a function of history.' Mr Cooley offers much 
in disproof of Galton's assertion that genius is independent of 
schools and social conditions. 

That the spread of education and the existence of a demo- 
cratic spirit and democratic institutions further the develop- 
ment and the recognition of genius is a view that has much 
in its favour, judged by the history of Greece, Italy, the 
Netherlands, England, Scotland, and the United States — 
especially in those epochs when ' the people ' were more or 
less in evidence. And here it is worth remembering that 
childhood is essentially democratic, and it possesses in its 
collective aspect that very ' voice of the people,' in its most 
7iaive and genial form. Mr Cooley attaches considerable 
importance to the group-fashion in which genius is wont to 
appear, e.g.^ in Athens, 530-430 B.C. (statesmen, soldiers, 
literary and scientific men, philosophers, poets, etc.) ; in Italy, 
fifteenth century (painters) ; in England, 1550-1650 (literary and 
scientific men, poets, philosophers, statesmen, soldiers); America, 
1 783-1814 (literary men). Consideration of such groupings 
might well lead one to believe that there is ' something in the 
air ' when geniuses are born, something akin, perhaps, to the 
' feeling ' which is present at the production of the best things 
of childhood — races may be ' moved ' as children are some- 
times. The history of the outburst of dramatic genius all over 
western Europe in the last half of the sixteenth and the 
first half of the seventeenth century is most remarkable. The 
epoch from 1550 to 1650 is in fact the most glorious age the 
world has ever known. It saw the birth, in England, of 



THE RESEMBLANCES OF THE YOUNG 4I 

Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and many other dramatists of 
high rank ; in France, of Corneille, Racine, MoHere ; in Spain, 
of Calderon and Lope de Vega ; in Holland, of Vondel. And 
of other men of genius there were born in this age, in England, 
Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Bacon, Locke, Newton ; in France, 
Descartes; in Spain, Cervantes and Velasquez; in Holland, 
Spinoza. Nay, more, the twenty years, 1550-1570, count the 
birthdays of Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Bacon, Lope de 
Vega; and the twenty years, 1620-1640, saw born Dryden, 
Locke, Mohere, Racine, Spinoza. If one looks at the epoch 
1550-1650 and the age 1450-1550 which preceded it, one may 
be led to believe that it represented one of those resurgences 
of the genius of the race, in its most childlike form, the 
dramatic art, and those other sorts of youthful energy, in- 
vention and curiosity. 

Like a child, the race of man was at play with * the 
new-found isle,' the printing press, the new religion, and other 
manifestations of the age. If, as G. Stanley Hall says, ' genius 
only edits the inspiration of the crowd,' this age exemplifies 
the saying most remarkably, for there seemed to be an under- 
current of genius everywhere. It is worth noting, also, that 
the age was ushered in by the birth in 1552 of Spenser, who 
was 'the pleasing son of fancy,' and draws to a close with 
Locke, who sought to have learning made pleasant to children. 
Taken altogether, this period offers not a little evidence that 
not only is genius akin to childhood, but in its ways and 
means also similar to the latter. The precocity of child- 
learning at this epoch, also, even in classic studies, is another 
fact which goes to show that it was a period eminently 
suited to give the innate genius of childhood a fair opportunity. 
The precocity of childhood and genius seem at this period of 
the race's history to be correlated, a correlation favoured by 
the development of social institutions, new inventions Hke the 
printing press, new ventures like the seafaring of the fifteenth 
and sixteenth centuries, new religious movements, and the stir 
of new politics. 

Andrew Lang, in his very brief discussion of ' Genius in 
Children' (346, p. 37), seems to take a very favourable 
view of precocity, recognising the fact that certain things 
(mental inner vision, e.g., the capacity for doing things without 
taking pains, very common in children as compared with the 
ordinary adult) belong also to genius. Here again it is the 



42 THE CHILD 

retention of the genius of childhood that makes the adult 
genius. Lombroso (364, p. 15) also holds that the typical 
'man of genius' is precocious, considering, however, this pre- 
cocity ' morbid and atavistic, being observed among all savages,' 
and 'often among children of the insane,' although, on the 
other hand, he admits that ' many children who become great 
men have been regarded at school as bad, wild, or silly ; but 
their intelligence appeared as soon as the occasion offered, or 
when they found the true path of their genius.' Many in- 
stances of both kinds are given. Emerson may be taken as 
a fair example of precocity in childhood, Lowell, perhaps, to 
illustrate the opposite — both men of genius, both New Eng- 
landers. There is evidently, as Lang seems to hold, genius 
that is of necessity very precocious, and genius that may or may 
not be thus constituted at the start. We must also distinguish 
between the judgment of teachers as to the precocity of the 
child-genius and true precocity — many geniuses, as De Can- 
dolle has shown for France especially, have had very mediocre 
instructors ; and Galton, for English men of science, showed 
that the geniuses among them ' were not made by much or 
regular teaching.' 

Precocity of Genius, — Sully, in his study of 'genius and 
precocity,' concludes that 'genius is precocious in the sense 
of manifesting itself early,' and inclines to the view that an 
'early manifestation of genius is not incompatible with a 
prolonged, and even late development,' agreeing somewhat 
with Galton's opinion (230, p. 44) that eminent men surpass 
ordinary men not only in superiority from the first, but also 
in a more prolonged development. There is, then, as in 
the race and individual, in the genius a prolongation of 
infancy. Children are precocious as children, true genius 
is precocious as genius. /ls[ot every precocious child is a 
genius when adult, for clever children are killed off or re- 
pressed by circumstances of environments, incidents of de- 
velopment, defects of character, neglect of parents or teachers, 
etc., but the real genius is precociously equipped at the start, 
and a favourable environment establishes and sets in relief his 
superiority\ Donaldson (170, p. 354) has compiled from 
Sully's data respecting 287 distinguished men, a table [some- 
what modified here], which sets forth clearly the precocity of 
genius : — 



THE RESEMBLANCES OF THE YOUNG 



43 





</, 


m 


, 






Class of Genius. 


°l 


5^1 


IS 


-S-S^ 


Notable Exceptions to Precocious 
Genius and Fame. 








11- 










p.c. 


p.c. 


p.c. 




Musicians . 


40 


95 


100 


100 


Gluck, Wagner, (not original 
till middle life); Bach, 
Haydn (late in fame). 


Painters and 


S8 


8q 


q8 


100 


Ghirlandajo, Francia ; Wren 


Sculptors . 










(was distinguished in science, 
however, before 30). 


Scholars . . 


36 


8s 


71 


qo 




Poets . . . 


52 


75 


92 


92 


Camoens, Racine, Goldsmith, 
Dryden, Dante, Cowper — 
all late in fame. 


Scientists . 


36 


75 


80 


92 


Franklin ; Harvey and Darwin 
late in pubhcation. 


Novelists 


28 


75 


56 


80 


Defoe, Richardson, Sterne, 
Cervantes — late in pro- 
duction and fame. 


Philosophers 


31 


67 


56 


60 


Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, 
Leibnitz, Kant (but dabbled 
with other things). 


Totals . 


287 


80 


80 


84 





Musical talent is so precocious that only in about 6 per cent, 
of cases was there 'reason to conclude that there was no 
marked manifestation of abiHty in childhood'; of painters, 
sculptors and architects three-fourths, at least, 'are credited 
with having shown a decided skill before the age of fifteen ' ; 
so also with three out of every four poets, and nearly the 
same proportion of novelists ; of five-sixths of the scholars, 
historians and critics, three-fourths of the men of science, and 
two-thirds of the philosophers a precocious childhood may 
safely be predicted. Interesting for comparison with Sully's 
statistics are the results of the investigations of Miss Caroline 
Miles (426, p. 552), who found that of 100 Wellesley College 
women, 66 had ' expressed themselves in some art form 
[verse, stories, painting, music, drawing] before eighteen years 
of age.' The precocity of ordinary childhood is often very 
marked here. Another contribution to the argument for the 



44 



THE CHILD 



precocity of genius is furnished by the statistics of Dr E. G. 
Lancaster (345), although averages are not very satisfactory. 
The following table, compiled from Dr Lancaster's data, 
shows the chief facts : — 



Department. 


No. of 
Indi- 
viduals. 


Average Age at 

which Rare Talent 

was shown. 


Range 
of Years. 


Additional 
Remarks. 


Notes. 


Actors . . . 


100 


18 (first great suc- 


6-28 


90 per cent. 


Few of real 






cess). 




famous 
before 22. 


American 
stock. 


Novelists 


100 


31.6 (publication of 


12-51 


4 per cent. 




(mostly American) 




first novel). 




wrote 
' accept- 
ably' at 
22. 




Poets .... 


53 


1 8. 1 (first publica- 


9-50 


All wrote 


Publication 






tion). 




earlier 
than 18. 


often late. 


Inventors . . 


50 


33.8 (first patent). 


18-55 


Patents im- 
prove 
with age. 




Musicians 


100 


9--92- 


9-20 


95 per cent. 


Only 50 per 


(mostly European) 








showed 
rare tal- 
ent be- 
fore 16. 


cent. had 
musical par- 
ents. 


Professional 


100 


24.11 (graduation 




Only 8 per 


Age of recog- 


men (Ameri- 




from professional 




cent, be- 


nised suc- 


can, law, 




school), recog- 




gan pro- 


cess about 35. 


medicine and 




nised success 35. 




fessional 




theology) . . 








work be- 
fore 21. 




Artists (mostly 


53 


17.2. 


6-30 


90 per cent. 


50 per cent. 


American) 








showed 
talent by 
20. 


showed 
their talent 
between 10 
and 23. 


Missionaries . 


50 


22.2 (departure for 
field of service). 








Pioneers (Ameri- 


50 


17.6 (leaving for 


10-26 




R e p r e s e nts 


can). . . . 




west). 






spirit of ad- 
venture 60 
years ago. 


Scientists . . 


118 


18.9 (date of 'life 
interest '). 


10-30 




Age in column 
3 somewhat 
too old. 



Lancaster's paper is devoted to adolescence, and it is quite 
probable that larger series of statistics would emphasise more 
the precocious phenomena of childhood. Emotional genius 
(actors, poets, artists, etc.) is by him made later than it really 
is in its precocious development, while intellectual genius is 



I 

j THE RESEMBLANCES OF THE YOUNG 45 

even more belated. Donaldson (170, p. 355), who cites Sully's 
data, arrives at the general conclusion that 'precocity and 
genius go together,' which seems still the safe ground to take, 
for the exceptions (outside the pathological and the abnormal) 
gradually disappear, or are accounted for by environmental 
causes, when careful examination has been made of all details 
of information. 

The Normality of Genius. — That genius is a neurosis, a 
malady, something pathological or abnormal /^r se^ a species 
of degeneration of body sometimes, and sometimes of mind, 
or of both together, an old-time guess of the classic philo- 
sophers, which Lombroso and his disciples have sought to 
establish as a scientific theory, is a view that of late has been 
weakened rather than strengthened by the study of childhood. 
In so far as the genius is a child he is certainly not degenerate, 
but all the more removed from it, as childhood is. Precocity, 
it may be said, is normal among children, and genius may 
be held to be normal also in adults ; its rarity is the result of 
bad heredity and unfavourable environment, as also are the 
accidents and incidents of disease and degeneration which are 
made so much of by Lombroso in his remarkable study of the 
Man of Genius (364, p. 359). Childhood is nature's best effort 
to begin the individual existence, genius her best attempt 
to perfect manhood. That while many are called, few are 
chosen, is for the present, and not for all time. The more we 
learn about the normaUty of the phenomena of childhood, the 
less inclined shall we be to doubt the normality of genius. 
Genius has suffered not a Httle, as Mr Yoder (691, p. 146) 
notes, from 'the tendency to contrast mental greatness with 
physical weakness,' and parents, nurses and friends have 
combined to exaggerate the pains and frailties of their early 
and even their later life — some going so far as to set up ill- 
health per se as the maker of great minds. ' Natural, healthy 
development,' Mr Yoder points out, is shown by very many of 
the great men of the present century (Tennyson, Lincoln, 
Lowell, Beecher, etc.), and its entire consistency with the best 
development of mind is becoming more and more apparent. 
Childhood has profited, in general, much more by the im- 
proved environment of to-day than has genius in special ; the 
latter still waits for that sanitation and improvement of society 
which shall make it lay claim to all its own. 



40 THE CHILD 

Genius in the Individual and iji the Race. — -There is, too, 
some correspondence between the precocity of the individual 
and the precocity of the race. This appears in the early 
development of art, poetry, etc. ' The artistic impulse,' says 
Sully (621, p. 602), 'which, according to our tables, shows itself 
to be most precocious, appears also to be the one first mani- 
festing itself in a decided form in the history of the average 
individual and of the race. The child and the race alike 
develop a crude art before they take seriously to inquiry. 
How far this consilience extends to the relative position of the 
several classes in our scheme I will not now venture to say.' 
Wallaschek's study of Primitive Music ; Haddon's Evolution 
in Art ; 'LetOMxnQ'dM's Literary Evolution ; Mason's Origins of 
Invejttion, and other recent works of like sort, contain 
abundant evidence as to the precocity of primitive races in 
the faculties under discussion. But much more detailed 
investigation is necessary before dogmatism is justifiable. 
' Recognition of the operations of Nature,' says Professor 
Mason (411, p. 22), 'constitutes the genius of invention. The 
Australian, or humble people just like him, commenced this 
wonderful process. Those "cunning little creatures," as 
Emerson called them, invented the boomerang. And there is 
not a patent-office in the world that would refuse to grant 
them letters for the exclusive use thereof for seventeen years.' 
Equally precocious in the race is the art of the Eskimo and the 
people of the river-drift in France, the poetry of the Hottentots 
(even Strabo thought the first human speech was poetry), and 
the philosophy of the Zuni Indians, while the dramatic instinct 
is revealed in all parts of the w^orld in the,ritualisation of myths 
among primitive peoples, and precocity of scholarship is 
abundantly present among the negro tribes of Africa and 
certain American Indians where polyglot speakers and 
historians are very common. Anaximander and Darwin have 
had their aboriginal predecessors, and the sacred books of 
India and China have anticipated more than one doctrine 
of the present day. One need not hold that the human race 
is a 'sport,' as Dr D. G. Brinton suggests, or that genius is 
a sport, but simply that the earHer races of man, the individual 
in his childhood, and the adult genius, have been rather under- 
rated than not. 

Heredity and Environinent. — Dr Robert Fletcher, in an 



THE RESEMBLANCES OF THE YOUNG 47 

interesting discussion of the question, ' The Poet : is he born, 
not made?' — a question first raised by one Florus, a Latin 
epigrammatist, of whose writings only a few fragments survive, 
one of which Ben Jonson uses in his play. Every Man in 
His Humour — ' They are not born every year, as an alderman. 
There goes more to the making of a good poet than a sheriff,' 
comes to the conclusion that 'the poet is born and made.' 
(215, p. 135). This is about the view of Ben Jonson 
himself, who, in his celebrated eulogy of ' gentle Shakespeare,' 
declares, ' for a good poet's made as well as born.' And we 
may extend this thought, with proper qualification, to all the 
manifestations of genius in the individual, and in the race, 
in all ages, and among all peoples. Genius might well bear on 
its shield the motto of the Austrian Order of the Iron Crown 
— auita et aucta, ' inherited and increased.' 

The foregoing facts and arguments, while they may not 
justify the declaration of Kiefer (326, p. 58) that 'all 
children are actually intellectually equal,' do, nevertheless, go 
far to vindicate such statements as that of Baldwin (23, p. 38) : 
' It is perfectly certain that two in every three children are 
irretrievably damaged or hindered in their mental or moral 
development in the schools ; but I am not sure that they 
would fare better if they stayed at home.' To accommodate 
the environment to the child, and to let the school supple- 
ment and stimulate the best efforts of nature, is the problem 
here. 

Very interesting in this connection are the experiments 
reported by Dr E. H. Lindley in his ' Study of Puzzles,' a 
valuable contribution to the psychological literature of plays 
and games. According to Dr Lindley (360, p. 480), the 
' so-called plasticity of childhood ' does not necessarily signify 
' resource, initiation, promptness of adaptation of the new,' but 
rather that children are, par excellence, 'imitative beings, and 
hence can quickly learn new ways of doing.' Dr Lindley puts 
this view of the matter well, when he says : ' Every normal 
child may indeed be a " genius," but not of the inventive and 
creative sort. Just as recent researches indicate that he is 
less inventive in language than was formerly thought, so in other 
phases of activity, less and less is being credited to his 
initiative, and more to imitation. This does not degrade the 
mental status of children, but rather dignifies imitation as the 



48 THE CHILD 

great means by which the mind gets experience. Inventiveness 
is a plant of slow growth. Protected as he is from the bewild- 
ering complexity of environment, the child only slowly gains 
the wide variety of experiences which favours creative activity, 
and which makes for the higher adaptabiUty that is necessary 
for adult life.' The author, however, magnifies too much, 
perhaps, the difference between ' imitative ' and ' inventive ' 
or ' creative ' genius, crediting childhood with too little of the 
latter, and forgetting that it is imitation of adults that really 
lowers the tone and the power of child-genius. 

It would seem that, for young individuals, as for young 
races, the way is much the same, the fundamental factors in 
education, as in civilisation, being, outside of the intellectual 
capacity, opportunity, suitable milieu^ sustained interest. To 
the historical incident, so powerful in leading races up to the 
heights of civilisation, may be said to correspond the personal 
incident so influential with the child. Dr Boas (60, p. 10) 
has remarked : ' Historical events appear to have been much 
more potent in leading races to civiUsation than their faculty, 
and it follows that achievements of races do not warrant us to 
assume that one race is more highly gifted than the other.' 
Something similar might be said for the children of all the 
races of men. Judged from a purely intellectual point of view, 
children, like races, may not differ so greatly from one another 
after all, though circumstances, surroundings, events, uncon- 
trollable influences and unfavourable environments often drive 
them far apart. The sporadic occurrence of genius, not always 
explainable by the laws of heredity, the sudden bursting forth 
of talent (in advanced years even) where none was looked for, 
the constantly increasing appreciation of childhood since ' child- 
study' has revealed its deeper wisdom and its inexhaustible 
variety — these and many other things seem to speak for the 
essential genius of childhood everywhere. Nor must it be for- 
gotten that when we have the child in the presence of matters 
not the product of our civilisation so much as the outcome of 
universally human needs and requirements, the beginnings of 
the graces and the arts of all humanity, we get some glimpse 
of a real genius that belongs to him as a child, apart from that 
of mere intellect. And it is so, too, with primitive races. 
Anatomical, physiological, psychological differences exist be- 
tween races and between individuals, but are they in all 



THE RESEMBLANCES OF THE YOUNG 49 

normal cases of such a character that we are justified in 
declaring that, ab initio, race A or individual A was superior 
intellectually to race B or individual B under the same 
favourable environment and stimuli? It would seem as if 
our range of knowledge must be far wider and more pro- 
found before we can venture to take up the challenge of 
the poet : — 

' Who can declare for what high cause 
This DarUng of the Gods was born ? ' 




II 



< I 



in rT 

o S 



CHAPTER IV 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 



Theory of Recapitulation. — Professor A. Milnes Marshall, 
in his address before the Biological Section of the British 
Association for the Advancement of Science, at Leeds in 
1890, on the 'Development of Animals' (407, p. 827), 
discussing the implications of the doctrine of descent, 
points out that 'The study of Development, in its turn, 
has revealed to us that each animal bears the mark of 
its ancestry, and is compelled to discover its parentage 
in its own development j that the phases through which an 
animal passes in its progress from the egg to the adult are no 
accidental freaks, no mere matters of developmental con- 
venience, but represent more or less closely, in more or less 
modified manner, the successive ancestral stages through which 
the present condition has been acquired. Evolution tells us 
that each animal has had a pedigree in the past. Embryology 
reveals to us this ancestry, because every animal in its own 
development repeats this history, climbs up its own genea- 
logical tree. Such is the Recapitulation Theory hinted at 
by Agassiz, and suggested more directly in the writings of 
von Baer, but first clearly enunciated by Fritz Miiller, and 
since elaborated by many, notably by Balfour and Haeckel.' 
All this is summed up in the statement that ontogeny repeats 
phylogeny. the individual the race. Professor Marshall notes 
that ' recapitulation is not seen in all forms of development, 
but only in sexual development ; or, at least, only in develop- 
ment from the egg. In the several forms of asexual develop- 
ment, of which budding is the most frequent and most familiar, 
there is no repetition of ancestral phases ; neither is there, in 
cases of regeneration of lost parts, such as the tentacle of a 
snail, the arm of a star-fish, or the tail of a lizard; in such 

51 



52 THE CHILD 

regeneration it is not a larval tentacle or arm or tail that is 
produced, but an adult one.' The study of the development 
of individual animals and species of animals discloses to us 
also 'a series of ingenious, determined, varied, but more or 
less unsuccessful efforts to escape from the necessity of re- 
capitulating, and to substitute for the ancestral process a more 
direct method.' This view that the individual more or less 
distinctly repeats at least the chief stages in the development 
of the race, both mentally and physically, has been accepted as 
the cardinal doctrine of the newer theories of education which 
in the form of 'child-study' have made their influence felt in 
America and in the Old World. 

Some Lijnitations of the Theory. — It is possible, however, 
to exaggerate both the role and the significance of recapitula- 
tion in biology, and Professor L. C. Miall, in his ' Address to 
the Zoological Section ' of the British Association at Toronto, 
in August 1897, thinks Professor Marshall has done this, when 
he declares that ' the proof of the theory depends chiefly on 
its universal applicability to all animals, whether high or low, 
in the zoological scale, and to all their parts and organs.' 
The study of the development of creatures below the mammal 
has by no means given us an abundance of light upon the 
subject. According to Professor Miall (425, p. 16) : — 
' The development of a mammal, for instance, brings to light 
what I take to be clear proof of a piscine stage ; but the stage 
or stages immediately previous can only be vaguely described 
as vertebrate, and when we go back further still all resem- 
blance to particular adult animals is lost.' There is some 
truth in Professor Miall's commonplace comparison, when he 
remarks that the thoroughgoing recapitulationist ' has picked 
out all the big strawberries and put them at the top of the 
basket.' Miall himself, while he admits no sort of necessity 
for the recapitulation of the events of the phylogeny in the 
development of the individuals, believes, nevertheless, that 
' certain facts in the development of animals have an historical 
significance, and cannot be explained by mere adaptation to 
present circumstances; further, that adaptations tend to be 
inherited at corresponding phases, both in the ontogeny and 
the phylogeny.' 

Some of the limitations of the ' Recapitulation ' theory are 
also discussed by Professor J. Mark Baldwin, who emphasises 
the role of habit and accommodation, with their inevitable 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 53 

'short-cuts,' and the lengthening of human infancy (23, 
p. 20). 

As Professor C. S. Minot points out in his study of 
'Heredity and Rejuvenation' (428, p. 578), the primitive 
form of the ontogenetic development of the young is repre- 
sented by the larva (as in sponges, coelenterates, echino- 
derms, worms), and not by the embryo, whose appearance is 
much later in the scale of life. The great difference between 
the two lies in the fact that the larvce ' live a free life and have 
to nourish themselves,' while the embryos 'have no free life, 
and are fed by the yolk collected in the egg.' Embryonic 
development, therefore, was dependent upon the yolk, which 
' has arisen very gradually,' and only after the great increase 
in size of the yolk among the higher animals could real 
embryonic development be said to exist — larval development 
passing gradually into embryonic with the growth in size of 
the yolk. Embryonic development, with the coming of the 
social milieu^ a ' second mother ' to the child, passes into 
prolonged infancy, and the social protection and feeding of 
the young child necessarily exert considerable influence upon 
the way in which, as he grows up, he repeats, particularly, the 
mental development of the race. However great have been 
the disturbing factors in the pre-natal existence, wherein 
physical and animal life-history is more or less recapitulated, 
the elements which enter into the disturbance of the post- 
natal recapitulation are even greater. The environment, in 
the latter case, is of an entirely different sort, and its modi 
opera?idi are also of a new and diverse nature. 

This prolongation of the psychic infancy and childhood 
of the individual, so marked among the civilised races of the 
present, does not characterise the primitive peoples in like 
manner. Among the Athka Aleuts, 'the boy is an inde- 
pendent hunter at ten and may marry ' ; the boy of the 
Bismarck Archipelago, who goes out w^ith his father very 
early, ' knows as much as he does by his tenth or twelfth 
year'; in Tahiti the ease with which food can be obtained 
allows children to become practically free from parental 
control, and ' by their eighth year to set up a sort of group- 
life by themselves ' ; among the Khevsurs of the Caucasus 
children early learn to fight, and ' by their eighth or tenth 
year may and do speak their word in public ' (613, II. p. 216) ; 
and many more examples from all over the world might be 



54 THE CHILD 

cited. This fact has been held to justify, though it clearly 
cannot do so altogether, the view of those who maintain 
'that the play-period [in the individual] as such is largely 
the result of civilisation, and that it has therefore no counter- 
part in race development,' for in the development of the race 
as a whole 'no play-period, such as is characteristic of the 
child, is found, and even in the individual child, among 
primitive people, the play-period is far less marked than in 
civiHsation' (659, p. 386). It has been suggested also that 
the ' period of adolescence,' with the ' marked emotional and 
pathological characteristics that so often accompany it,' is also, 
in part, 'the result of civilisation' (659, p. 386). The writers 
who take this view seem to make too much of ' the fact that 
imitation, which plays so important a part in the development 
of the child, could not act in the development of the peoples 
who worked out their own advancement independently,' of 
the ' use of a ready-made language and the entrance by means 
of it into an inherited experience,' as it were, and of the fact 
to which Lange (347) and Dr Lukens have called attention 
(380) that ' the child is surrounded by culture-material of a 
much higher grade than that which he himself could produce, 
and that, in consequence, the receptive, sensory side of his 
nature is stimulated, while the productive, motor side is as 
yet undeveloped,' whereas in race-development 'productive 
activity has developed hand in hand with the sensory.' This, 
however, is by no means altogether true, and it is certainly 
hazardous to declare that ' the kind of play activity which is 
peculiar to the individual in his immature stage has no place 
in race development' (659, p. 387). Nor is it any truer that 
' as far as play activity has been found in the race it is of a 
different character, the result of exuberance of motor ability 
over and above what is necessary for the support of life.' 
For, just as individuals are children and youth because they 
must play, before being competent to use and control the 
activities of adult life, so nations which are to be civilised 
must be savage and barbarous in order to use rightly the 
ways and means of culture and enlightenment. There is in 
savagery and barbarism more of the play which is akin to that 
of childhood than is commonly believed, and the parallel 
between the child and the race is scarcely any the worse off 
here than elsewhere. 

Parallel Groivth of the Lidividual and the Race. — The 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 55 

theory of a certain parallelism in the growth of the individual 
and in that of the race is by no means new, and seems early 
to have obtained wide currency in certain educational theories 
of a more or less philosophical sort. Dr E. von Sallwiirk 
credits Rousseau with having been the first to propose the 
education of man according to the general evolution of the 
human race, both in his discourse on 'The Origin^ and 
Foundations of Inequality among Men,' and in his Emile, 
where 'we find the ^^;^(?//^ principle recognised' (562, p. 13). 

Lessing, in his Education of the Human Race^ the gist 
of which is contained in the epigrammatic statement, ' educa- 
tion is revelation coming to the individual man, and revelation 
is education which has come, and is yet coming, to the human 
race,' spoke also of the parallelism in question, in these words : 
'The very same way by which the race reaches its perfec- 
tion, must every individual man — one sooner, another later — 
have travelled over.' 

Herder, the great German poet and historic philosopher, 
who was influenced more or less by Rousseau, compared the 
life of the race with the life of the individual, for humanity 
itself, in his conception, lived, felt and moved largely as did 
each particular man, played upon and interplayed around and 
about with the environment of nature, through which ran 
from stone to man one connected thread of being. The 
Orient represented the infancy of mankind, Egypt and 
Phoenicia its boyhood, Greece its youth, Rome its manhood, 
Christianity its old age. 

Goethe also had the idea of the parallelism of the growth 
of the individual and the race (562, p. 18), as the following 
passage from his conversations with Eckerman shows : 
' Youth must always begin from before, and as an individual 
pass through the epochs of world-culture.' 

Home, the Scottish philosopher, in his Sketches of the 
History of Man, the second edition of which appeared in 1778, 
writes : ' A progress from infancy to maturity in the mind 
of man, similar to that in his body, has often been men- 
tioned' (305, HI. p. 217), and, again: 'The savage state is 
the infancy of a nation' (IV. p. 128). Shelley, in his Defence 
of Poetry, declares that 'the savage is to age what the child 
is to years,' and utterances of a like sort are found in not 
a few of the poets and philosophers of the beginning of the 
century. 



56 THE CHILD 

Hegel, according to Professor Luqueer (382, p. 112), pre- 
ceded Comte, to whom Herbert Spencer attributes the enun- 
ciation of the doctrine, in declaring that ' the education of the 
child must accord both in mode and arrangement with the 
education of mankind as considered historically ; or, in other 
words, the genesis of knowledge in the individual must follow 
the same course as the genesis of knowledge in the race.' 
Hegel's own words are : ' The individual must traverse the 
stages of culture already traversed by the universal spirit. 
Doing this he must yet be aware that the spirit has outgrown 
these older forms. He must pass through them as over a 
well-travelled and even way. Thus we see knowledge, which 
in early times taxed the maturest minds of men, now become 
the property, or means for exercise and even play, of 
children.' 

Cultu7'e-Epoch Theory. — The ' culture-epoch ' theory of the 
Herbartians is one development of this view of the parallelism 
of the history of the individual and of the race to which he 
belongs, with which has been associated the correspondence of 
the ages of savagery, barbarism and civilisation in the indi- 
vidual and in the race. Some of the best arguments pro and 
con may be read in detail in Lange's discussion of ' Apper- 
ception ' (347, p. 115) and Capesius's suggestive essay on 
' Collective Development and Individual Development.' 
Lange points out that the child of to-day comes into contact, 
in the various social classes by which he is surrounded, with 
almost every epoch of the past history of his race, so complex 
is modern civilisation \ Dr Stockner remarks that there is no 
absolutely continual ascent in development — ' it has its 
mountains and valleys.' Dr Lange again styles the ' culture- 
epoch ' theory 'a child of necessity,' and declares that to-day 
' there is no need for the child to lead a nomad hfe, for the 
child is now a bearer of culture, not the adult of ages past, 
and to him may well be applied, ' What you have inherited 
from your fathers, acquire it in order to possess it.' 

Miss Nina C. Vandewalker, in her discussion of ' The 
Culture-Epoch Theory from an Anthropological Standpoint,' 
criticising the Herbartian ' culture-epoch ' theory, justly 
remarks that 'in considering race-development the fact is 
often overlooked that such development has not been homo- 
geneous and uniform, and that progress from cultural infancy 
to the maturity of civilisation cannot be traced in any one 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 57 

people . . . hence, at any historic period, people could be 
found in any or all of these stages, with infinite gradations 
between them' (659, p. 382). The North American Indians, 
for instance, at their discovery, represented practically all 
grades below that of the high civilisations of Europe and Asia, 
except that the lack of domesticated animals caused some 
noteworthy departures from the old-world developmental 
gradations. 

Morgan^ s Views. — Many writers, however, following in the 
steps of Lewis H. Morgan, the American ethnologist, whose 
work on Ancient Society was published in 1878, have, with due 
consideration, accepted his scheme of the development of 
mankind through savagery and barbarism to civilisation, and 
correlated it with the theory of the parallelism of the evolution 
of culture in the individual and the race, although it is evident 
that strict adhesion to Morgan's epochs can no longer be in- 
sisted upon ; the recent discoveries and researches of ethnology 
and anthropology have gone far beyond the outlook of his 
time. The six periods, which, according to Morgan, preceded 
the coming civilisation — some 5000 years ago — heralded by 
the invention of writing and the evolution of urban life, are 
seen in the table on p. 58 (compiled from his data), with the 
chief characteristics of each. 

Recent discoveries in Egypt and the Babylonian region 
have, of course, made the period of 5000 years, which Morgan 
assigned to civilisation, absurdly low, and ethnological studies 
all over the world have demonstrated the great relativity of 
the epochs and periods assumed by him, though enough truth 
remains in them to be very suggestive in education. 

Professor Woods Hutchinso?i s Periods of Childhood. — Pro- 
fessor Woods Hutchinson (312, p. 220), from the considera- 
tion of anthropological data, and the observation of the growth 
of the child-mind, comes to the conclusion that, for the alleged 
parallel between the development of the individual and that of 
the race, there is ' a sound physical basis, although no hard- 
and-fast lines can be drawn between the successive stages,' and 
adopts the different methods of food-getting as 'the basis for 
division into stages, least open to objection and most uniform 
in its results.' Dr Hutchinson makes out five stages, which, 
with their chief characteristics, are given in the table on p. 59, 
modified from that of the author, and containing the gist of 
his whole paper. 



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THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 



59 



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Dr Hutchinson looks forward to the arrangement of the 
school curriculum upon these or very similar lines, observing 
that ' if the sacred multiplication table were reserved until this 
stage (the fifth, when the first real recognition of the value and 



6o 



THE CHILD 



" sense " of arithmetic appears), it would be keenly enjoyed ! 
instead of hated as a " grind," and mastered in no time.' 

PoweWs Stages and their Characteristics. — Major J. W. 
Powell (505, p. 121), in his studies of the development of 
human society, recognises 'three grand stages, savagery, 
barbarism, civilisation,' with a dawning fourth, enlighten- 
ment. For comparison with more or less corresponding | 
stages in the life of the individual, the following table, 
constructed from the data in Major Powell's essay, may 
be of interest : — ! 





Savagery. Barbarism. 


Civilisation. 


Artefacts 


age of stone 


age of clay 


age of iron 


Navigation 


canoe (paddle) 


boat (oars) 


ship (sails) 


Music 


rhythm 


rhythm and 


rhythm, melody, and 






melody 


harmony 


Society 


kinship clan 


kinship tribes 


age of nations 


Society 


maternal kinship most 


paternal kinship 


territorial boundaries 




sacred 


most sacred 


most sacred 


Law designed 


to secure peace 


to secure peace 


to secure peace, au- 






and authority 


thority and justice 


Law extends to 


kindred only 


kindred and re- 


all the people of the 






tainers 


nation 


Language 


age of sentence-words 


age of phrase- 
words 


age of idea- words 


Writing 


picture-writings 


hieroglyphs 


alphabets 


Grammar 


no verb ' to be ' 


no verb ' to read ' 


parts of speech 


Religion 


beast polytheism 


nature poly- 
theism 


monotheism 


Powers of na- 


feared as evil demons 


worshipped as 


apprenticed servants 


ture are 




gods 




Wolf is 


oracular god 


howling beast 


connecting link in 
systematic zoology 


Mathematics 


count only 


arithmetic 


geometry 


Vision is limi- 


opinion 


horizon 


powers of telescope 


ted by 






and microscope 


Reason is based 


zoomorphic analogies 


anthropomorphic 


intrinsic homologies 


on 




analogies 




Greatest intel- 


difference between 


limited powers of 


physical explanation 


lectual dis- 


animate and inani- 


animals 


of powers and won- 


covery 


mate, organic and 




ders of the universe ; 




inorganic, living and 




intellectual superi- 




dead 




ority of man 


Deification 


beasts are gods 


gods are men 


men are as gods, 
knowing good from 
evil 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 



6l 



In his study of the development of ' the human activities 
which are designed to give pleasure,' Powell (508, p. 21) 
recognises four stages of culture through which the races of 
men have passed, or are now passing, viz., the hunter stage, 
the shepherd stage, the tyrant (or monarchical) stage, and the 
freedom (representative government, science) stage. The 
corresponding evolution of the various aesthetic arts, in these 
diverse periods, is indicated in the following table, based upon 
Powell's paper : — 



Art. 


Hunter 
Stage. 


Shepherd 
Stage. 


Monarchical 
Stage. 


Freedom 
Stage. 


Music 

Graphic Art 
Drama . . 
Romance . 
Poetry . . 


rhythm 
sculpture 
dance 
beast fable 
personification 


melody 
relief 
sacrifice 
power myth 
similitude 


harmony 

perspective 

ceremony 

necromancy 

allegory 


symphony 
chiaro-oscuro 
histrionic art 
novel 
trope 



Some parallelism exists here, also, between the development 
of the individual and that of the race, although the com- 
parisons are often hazardous. One of the best of the more 
recent attempts to classify the races of men upon a culture 
basis is made by Grosse, in his very interesting and suggestive 
monograph on the family and the early social economy of 
mankind. Without any rigidity, the following groups, accord- 
to Grosse, represent, in general fashion, the course of human 
history : (i) Lower hunters ; (2) higher hunters ; (3) pastoral ; 
(4) lower agriculturalists; (5) higher agriculturalists. Such a 
classification, however, is not evolutionary in the strict sense 
of the term, for all peoples have not passed through the same 
stages, while there is a considerable difference often between 
two peoples in the same stage of culture. 

Bos on the Culture-Epoch Theory. — The earlier writers of 
the last quarter of a century who discussed the development 
of human culture, it will be seen, agree in recognising above 
the first and most primitive epoch of the race's existence, 
three successive stages or periods characterised by hunting, 
the domestication of animals, and agriculture respectively, and 
with this theory usually went the corollary that every people 
must of necessity pass through these epochs, in the order 
named, on their road to culture and civiHsation. Even so 



62 THE CHILD 

recent an authority as G. de Mortillet, in his History of 
Buntings Fishing and Agriculture^ seems to hold to this view. 
Some few writers, however, Hke Schurtz, Petri and Grosse, 
have expressed more or less doubt as to the validity of these 
epochs, and put forward the view that, as the natural result 
of environment or of racial proclivities, hunting, the domesti- 
cation of animals and agriculture, have often been of inde- 
pendent and by no means successive development. The 
latest argument upon the subject is the essay of Bos (67), who, 
for the first time, points out the real condition of these arts 
and avocations among the most primitive races of the globe 
(the Veddahs of Ceylon and some of the Indian tribes of 
Brazil, e.g.)^ and their relation to social status and environ- 
ment, especially as to the sexual incident of the distribution 
of labour, and the complexities which have resulted from the 
play of the two most important factors of all human develop- 
ment — the hunger-impulse, which tends to the preservation of 
the individual, and the love-impulse, which makes for the 
preservation of the species. According to Bos, there are 
many facts which speak against the recognition of the three 
'epochs' under consideration as 'stages of culture.' Many 
animals have the hunting instinct well developed, as others 
have the storing impulse. We are prone to think of agricul- 
ture as necessarily connected with (and subsequent to) the 
domestication of animals, while, as a matter of fact, we find 
certain forms of agriculture attaining a comparatively high 
development among the North American Indians, the Pacific 
Islanders and other more or less savage or barbarous peoples, 
without the assistance of any domesticated animal whatever. 
Nor can it be said that all agricultural peoples are higher than 
all hunting peoples in the scale of culture, for leisure for art 
and social institutions of a nature suited to their environment 
have more than once elevated the latter above the former. 
Some of the Indian tribes of Brazil, according to Karl von 
den Steinen, are, in a sense, good agriculturists, without pos- 
sessing more than a menagerie of tame (not domesticated or 
utilised) beasts and birds ; they might, perhaps, be compared 
to children with their captive pets and their garden-plots, 
without the artificialities springing from adult environment. 
The result of the investigations of the economic life of primi- 
tive peoples, as we now have them at least, shows that no 
people is absolutely confined to one business or occupation 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 63 

during any stage of ' culture ' ; that industry is often younger 
than agricuUure, and agriculture often earlier than hunting and 
fishing ; the beginnings of them all really being present in the 
remotest periods of human history, ready to be developed by 
the touch of environment or necessity, the mighty influence of 
surrounding nature upon the arts of man, or those impulses 
within him which lead him to do the thing necessary for life 
and pleasure with the least expenditure of energy. That 
agriculture should naturally appear alongside hunting in 
one and the same tribe at one and the same time 
(as among certain Indian tribes of Brazil) is really the 
result of sex-adjustments and not an evidence of retrogression 
and degeneracy, for here man is the hunter, woman the tiller 
of the soil, and the economic life of each has a certain 
autonomy of development which repeats itself again and again 
in the history of the highest civiUsed races. Out of this duality. 
Bos believes there arose the unity of the family. The fact 
noted by von den Steinen (67, p. 209) that in certain Indian 
tribes the men roast their food (largely flesh and fish), while the 
women boil theirs (largely vegetable), is paralleled in other 
parts of the world as well; and the chef of the modern hotel 
or millionaire's palace shows that the art is not extinct in the 
male half of the race at this late day, while woman's vegetarian 
predilections, and her historical skih in the use of herbs and 
plant-poisons, are the proof that she also has not forgotten 
the early lessons of her sex. And Professor O. T. Mason 
has recently shown how much agriculture among primitive 
peoples is the art of woman, and how its methods and its 
implements are largely her ideas and her inventions. Bos's 
general conclusion is that just as we cannot exactly identify or 
make the same in every respect the same thing when done by 
two different individuals, so, with the economic forms and 
methods of the race, we must be careful not to identify them 
or make them exactly equivalent to stages of culture, for such 
they can be only in the most general interpretation, if at all. 
A better way, for the present at least, to classify human indus- 
tries, thinks Bos, is as follows : {a) Collectio?ial industries 
— gathering, picking up, etc., of plants, animals and minerals, 
from which the transition to hunting and fishing and some of 
the aspects of agriculture naturally takes place, {b) Productive 
industries — in which men assist nature in the production of 
natural products — hoHng and grubbing (and very primitive 



64 THE CHILD 

horticulture), domestication of animals, agriculture (with the 
aid of the plough, the cow and the horse) ; forestry, (c) 
Transformative industries — arts and manufacturing industries, 
architecture, milk-industry, etc. {d) Locoinotion industries — 
trade, commerce, etc. In all of these the influence of sex is 
often only second to that of environment, while in some cases 
it is even greater. 

After the arguments adduced by Bos, it will be admitted 
how difficult the verification of the three culture-stages under 
discussion is in the life of the individual. Thoreau, who held 
that, ' even in civilised communities, the embryo man passes 
through the hunter stage of development,' wrote : ' There is a 
period in the history of the individual, as of the race, when 
the hunters are the "best men," as the Algonquins called 
them. We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired 
a gun ; he is no more humane, while his education has been 
sadly neglected. This was my answer with respect to those 
youths who were bent on this pursuit, trusting that they would 
soon outgrow it' (638, p. 213). So, too, with fishing — for 
fishing and hunting, Thoreau tells us, are ' oftenest the young 
man's introduction to the forest [where of old dwelt his pro- 
genitors of the prime], and the most original part of himself.' 

The 'collection-instinct,' so-called, characteristic of certain 
periods of childhood and youth, deserves study in the light of 
the researches of Bos and others and the studies of De Sanctis. 
Especially important is the relation of environment and oppor- 
tunity to culture in connection with theories of 'culture- 
epochs.' 

Social Types. — Some light is thrown upon the question of 
'culture-epochs' and 'developmental stages' by Demolins in 
his study of the ' social types ' of Southern and Central France, 
where the great role of the nature of the place, and of the 
labour in the formation of these 'types' is pointed out, 
although the author seems to emphasise too much the environ- 
mental factors of a more or less physical sort to the detriment 
of the historical, religious, moral and artistic. One 'social 
type' may be derived from pastoral art, another from the 
exploitation of fruit trees, a third from manufacture, a fourth 
from transportation and commerce, while the ' petite culture ' 
and the 'grande culture' have each their peculiar 'types.' 
There are also varieties and sub-divisions of these 'social 
types.' The shepherd type of the Pyrenees and the Alps differs 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 65 

from that of the calcareous plateaus of the Ge'vaudan and 
the Rouergue, and both of these from that of the volcanic 
region of the Auvergne ; the Limousin and Perigord type of 
the chestnut and walnut region is not altogether one with the 
Provencal type of the olive region or with the Gascon- 
Armagnac type of the vine region ; the ' social types ' of the 
river valleys of the plateaus differ also in their several varieties. 
The social condition of Central and Southern France still feels 
the influence of pastoral communism, which has contributed so 
much to make the people live, as it were, on the family, their 
friends and neighbours, the clan, the State, unconsciously form- 
ing some of the worst developments of modern French politics. 
In this connection also one may well read T. E. Cliffe 
Leslie's admirable article on 'Auvergne,' in which the culture- 
shaping powers of mountain and plain are placed in contrast. 
'Greater differences of human life, motive and pursuit,' says 
this author, 'are to be found in parts of the province of 
Auvergne, a few miles from each other — in adjacent districts 
of mountain and plain, for example — than some which are 
often pointed to between Frenchmen and Englishmen as 
the consequences of an original difference of race' (354, 

P- 753)- 

As Dr W. J. McGee has pointed out : ^ ' In desert regions the 
tendency of common strife against a hard physical environment 
is towards the development of co-operation and interaction, 
which stimulate the altruism of civilisation.' This may have 
contributed to make not a few primitive peoples, living in very 
unfavourable environments, hospitable, social and altruistic to 
a degree much beyond what one might expect from the general 
character of their arts and institutions, and we see the same 
fact repeated, perhaps in the development of the same unselfish 
trait in children, subject to a like harsh and unfavourable 
milieu. Nature can come dangerously near sometimes to 
producing figs from thistles. It has been given to some 
peoples, as to some individuals, to simulate without the aid of 
the arts and institutions that have been at the disposal of 
others (moving with perfect order through the various stages 
of culture) some of the noblest virtues and best graces of 
human kind. A 'lodge in some vast wilderness' has more 
than once tamed a savage people, no less than a single savage 
human. Not 'self-help' alone, as Carlyle says, does the 
^ Science, Jan. 14, 1898, p. 54. 
E 



66 THE CHILD 

young Ishmael acquire in the destitution of the wild deserts 
but the higher and nobler other-help as well. The study of 
the effects of several environments upon the same race, and of 
one and the same environment upon different races, of change 
of environment, of painful and pleasurable environments, 
etc., has hardly yet been entered upon in the true anthropo- 
psychological sense. 

Periods of Child Life. — Not only does the child seem to 
recapitulate physically and mentally the chief points of the 
race's history, but his own development is fairly teeming with 
epochs and periods, isolated spots sometimes, the interpreta- 
tion of which is not yet at hand. 

Ancient philosophy, modern folk-lore and the poetry of all 
ages have more or less to say concerning some of these 
'periods of life,' but the great mass of them, many of which 
have only recently come to light since the study of the growing 
child has come to be so zealously pursued, yet await satis- 
factory explanations. The enumeration of some of these 
'periods,' with some few words of comment, may not be 
without interest, since the subject is one which has not yet 
been discussed to any great extent, and most of the facts are 
new and of great value. 

Pythagoras, the philosopher of Samos, who lived more 
than five centuries before the Christian era, used to delimit the 
various epochs in the life of man thus : Child, 1-20 years ; 
young man, 20-40 years; man, 40-60 years; old man, 6080 
years ; dead, 80 years and over. In the Li Ki, the sacred 
book of the Chinese, we find the following ancient division 
(559, p. 65) : ' When one is ten years old, we call him a boy ; 
he goes (out) to school. When he is twenty, we call him a 
youth ; he is capped. When he is thirty, we say "he is at his 
maturity" ; he has a wife. When he is forty, we say " he is in 
his vigour"; he is employed in office. When he is fifty, we 
say "he is getting grey"; he can discharge all the duties of an 
officer. When he is sixty, we say " he is getting old "; he gives 
directions and instructions. When he is seventy, we say " he is 
old"; he delegates his duties to others. At eighty or ninety 
we say "he is very old." When he is seven, we say that he is 
an object of pitying love. Such a child and one who is very 
old, though they may be chargeable with crime, are not subject 
to punishment. At a hundred he is called a centenarian, and 
has to be fed.' Shakespeare, sociologically-minded, like the 



LX. 


Years- 


-Aged. 




LXX. 


j; 


Ugly. 




LXXX. 


,, 


Waste and cold 


XC. 


,, 


Martyr. 




C. 


,, 


Dead. 





THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 6/ 

old Chinese writer, has immortalised the ' seven ages ' of man, 
which are his ' acts.' 

In the popular literature of Germany in the sixteenth 
century, the following characterisation of the various epochs of 
woman's life is to be found (498, I. p. 300) : — 

X. Years — Child-nature. 
XX. ,, Tender virgin. 
XXX. ,, Housewife. 
XL. ,, Matron. 
L. ,, Grandmother. 

The English folk-rhyme of the diverse ages of man occurs 
in Tusser's Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, 
pubhshed in 1557 : — 

' The first seven years, bring up as a child ; 
The next to learning, for waxing too wild ; 
The next, to keep under Sir Hobbard de Hoy ; 
The next, a man, and no longer a boy. ' 

Here we have four periods of seven' years each, with the 
attainment of manhood at the twenty-eighth year. 

The Psychological ^ Ages.' — Dr E. C. Sanford, of Clark 
University, Worcester, Mass., in the course of a lecture before 
the Summer School of 1899, suggested a scientific rearrange- 
ment of the ' Seven Ages ' of Shakespeare, somewhat as 
follows : I. Birth to three years. The age of physical adjust 
ment, learning to talk and to walk ; period of emotional 
fickleness and self-regardfulness. 2. Three to fifteen years. 
The age of social adjustment — the school age. During this 
period the physical development goes on towards complete- 
ness. The child begins to see the advantage of paying some 
attention to the rights of others, is less self-regardful, but 
reflective thought, persistency and will-quality are still weak. 
3. Fifteen to twenty five years. This period of youth is largely 
one of transition. Boyhood and girlhood are practically com- 
plete ; there is rapid growth and strong vitality, and heredity 
makes itself felt. Great emotional changes take place at this 
epoch. It is the period of religion, hero-worship, ideals, 
dreams, romance, of the new sense of self and of others, of the 
craving for notice, sympathy, companionship, love. Human 
beings at this time begin to do right because they feel it is 
right. The bad and morbid aspects of this period are juvenile 
crime and the psychic disturbances of adolescence and the like. 



68 THE CHILD 

4. Twenty-five to forty years. The age of action, of establish- 
ment in vocation, business, work. This is the period of young 
manhood, with all that that means. 5. Forty to sixty five years. 
The beginning of the period of middle age sees quite a break 
with the previous age of young manhood, of which the maain 
factors are mental. By middle age the man comes to recognise 
the impossibility of the fulfilment of the ambitions of his youth, 
and turns to his children for their realisation, or, if childless, 
turns to philanthropy, charity, etc. 6. Sixty five to seventy five 
years. This period of elderly life is, in people who have lived 
properly and not abused their body or their faculties, a period 
of considerable activity in lines similar to those of the previous 
period, or, in some cases, of scientific or business activity to a 
noteworthy degree. "]. Seventy five years and outwards. Period 
in which the powers begin to break up and the end of life 
approaches. 

The Australian ' Ages ' ; other Pi'imitive Ideas. — Certain 
Central Australian tribes, whose ceremonies of childhood and 
manhood have been described by Professor Baldwin Spencer, ^ 
recognise the following periods of life, for which they possess 
special terms : i. Amba-querka — mere child; 2. Ulpmerka — 
applied to the boys who, at the age of 10-12 years, have been 
'tossed in the air,' and painted on the back and chest; 3. 
Arrakurta — after circumcision, which takes place at puberty 
or very shortly after; 4. Ertiva-kurka — after the youth has 
undergone the ceremony of ' sub-incision,' which occurs a short 
time after circumcision ; 5. Urliara — after he has gone through 
the ' Engwurra, or Fire Ceremony,' a rite to which young men 
of 20-25 years, or even somewhat older, are subjected. 

It is interesting to note that the Ulpmerka boy is told that 
' this ceremony will promote his growth, and that the time has 
now come when he must no longer play with and live at the 
camp of the women, but must go to that of the unmarried men 
and live with them. He begins to accompany the men in 
their hunting expeditions, listens to their talks around the 
camp-fire at night, and looks forward to the time when he shall 
be admitted to the privilege of manhood.' Of the Engwurra 
ceremony, the natives say it makes the boys ertwa murra 
oknirra, ' men, good, very, or great.' 

The Omaha Indians, as Miss Alice C. Fletcher notes in 
her account of the ritual of the scalp-lock (212, p. 447), 
1 Nature, Vol. LVI, pp. 136-139. 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 69 

recognised four stages in man's life upon earth : 

1. Childhood, which was conceived to begin when the child 
was able to walk steadily and be independent of its mother. 

2. Youth. 3. Manhood. 4. Old age. This simple division 
serves for very many other primitive peoples as well. 

In China, where reverence and ceremony have always 
counted for so much, the passage from childhood to manhood 
was marked out ages ago in a fashion pecuHar to the Flowery 
Kingdom. In the Li Ki (the text of which is certainly 1900 
years old) the following are given as proper answers to ques- 
tions respecting the ' grown-up ' character of individuals of 
various ranks : Emperor : He has begun to wear a robe so 
many feet long. Ruler of a State : He is able to attend to the 
services in the ancestral temple, and at the altars of the spirits 
of the land and grain. Son of great Officer: He is able to 
drive. Son of ordinary Officer : He can manage the conveying 
of a salutation, or a message. Son of common Man: He is 
able to carry a bundle of firewood (559, p. 115). 

The ' Ages ' of Emotional Expression. — Mantegazza, in his 
work on Physiognomy and Expression^ thus divides human life 
as marked into periods by characteristic joys (399, p. 118): 
I. Lifancy and Childhood. Good humour; consciousness of 
perfect health. 2. Adolescence. Heedlessness ; muscular in- 
toxication. 3. Youth. Joys of love ; contemplation of the 
world through rose-coloured glasses. 4. Adult age. The 
pleasures of strife and of satisfied self-esteem. 5. Old age. 
The tender joys of affection ; the melancholy of tender 
memories. 

The corresponding grief periods are as follows : i. Child- 
hood. Cries without tears j abundant weeping. 2. Adolescence. 
Calm and melancholy sadness. 3. Youth. Menacing reaction. 
4. Adult age. Expression of bitterness. 5. Old age. Plaintive 
groans and tears. 

As a general formula, or resume of the comparative 
physiology of expression at different ages, Mantegazza gives 
the following (399, p. 223) : — i. Little child. Expression strong 
and poor. 2. Older child. Expression strong and fairly rich 
in peculiarities. 3. Young man. Expression strong, rich, and, 
above all, expansive. 4. Adult. Expression better balanced ; 
rather richer in peculiarities of great intensity ; becoming less 
and less expansive. 5. Old mafi. Expression feeble, un- 
certain and very concentric. 



70 THE CHILD 

According to Mantegazza the expression of a little child 
under painful emotions ' resembles that of a monkey or a 
negro,' while, in a child of three, with its few speech-gestures, 
we have before us 'the picture of a savage who accentuates 
badly the striking points of his discourse and the extreme 
degrees of his emotion.' The 'expression of transition,' to be 
noted at the intermediate age between early childhood and 
youth, persists in the permanent condition in the men of lower 
race, and, in the higher races, in stupid individuals. In old 
age, expression takes on again an infantile character, while 
' feminine expression may be characterised in a word by saying 
that it somewhat resembles that of the child.' 

Some of the anatomists, physiologists and anthropologists 
have gone into great detail in distinguishing the growth periods 
of the human body and its organs. 

The ' Ages ' of tJie Physiologist and the Anatomist. — Dr E. 
Verrier (663, pp. 6-8), who confesses his Hking, which 
Hippocrates shared, for the good number seven, divides human 
life in these periods : .1. Fij'st childhood {le premier age), from 
birth to seven years, the epoch of dentition. 2. Second child- 
hood {la deuxieme enfance), from seven to fourteen years, epoch 
of the production of the seminal liquid. 3. Adolescence, from 
fourteen to twenty-one years, until the appearance of the beard. 
4. Youth {juvenilite) from twenty-one to twenty-eight years, until 
the complete growth of the body. 5. Manhood {Phommefait), 
from twenty-eight to forty-nine years. 6. Age {Thomme age), from 
forty-nine to fifty-six years. 7. Old age {la vieillesse), from fifty- 
six years until death. The first childhood may be divided into 
sub-periods : (i) Suckling-time, from birth to the end of the 
second year. (2) From the second to the third year. 

The first childhood is susceptible of several sub-divisions, 
and Dr Verrier applies the term ' new-born ' to the child only 
till the falling of the umbilical cord, usually about the fifth day 
of life. 

Lacassagne recognises the following periods of human life 
from the beginning to the end : i. Foital life. 2. First childhood 
up to the seventh month. 3. Second childhood, from the 
seventh month to the second year. 4. Third childhood, from 
the second to the seventh year. 5. Adolescence, from the 
seventh to the fifteenth year. 6. Fuberty, from the fifteenth 
to the twentieth year. 7. Adult age, from the twentieth to the 
thirtieth year. 8. Virility, from the thirtieth to the fortieth 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 71 

year. 9. 'Age de retour^'' from the fortieth to the sixtieth 
year. 10. Old age^ from the sixtieth year till death (344, 

p. 85)- 

Springer, from the point of view of growth, which he defines 
as ' not an individual state, a particular biological force, simply 
a manner of being of the evolution of living matter — a char- 
acteristic of the first stadium of evolution ' (607, p. 15), recog- 
nises three periods of growth in man : i. First childhood^ from 
birth to weaning — at most two years ; 2. Second childhood, from 
weaning to puberty — lasts till about 10-12 years, varying 
however a good deal with sex, race, climate, etc. ; 3. Early 
manhood, from puberty to complete development at about 
20-22 years (with variations). 

An all-important factor of growth is food (and mode of 
taking food) ; in the critical transition epochs food plays a 
dominant role physiologically. The link between the first and 
the second period of childhood is weaning (mastication begins 
almost with walking), and after weaning, diseases take on 
themselves a more adult-like character, and to the influence of 
weaning upon nutrition the author credits ' 75 per cent, of the 
deaths among infants confided to hired nurses.' Weaning is 
the critical period of infancy, and much of the rachitis develop- 
ing in childhood spring from premature or from tardy weaning. 
It is during the period of growth that 'all the attributes which 
specially characterise the human species, depending on the 
nervous system, develop, for at birth the child's nervous 
system is completely animal.' 

Tigerstedt, in his Human Physiology (640, II. p. 412), 
gives the common German division of life-periods as follows : 
I. New-born child, from birth to the fall of the navel-string, 
a period of about 4-5 days. 2. Suckling, from the end of the 
first period to about the seventh or ninth month, the time of 
the first dentition. 3. Later childhood, up to about the seventh 
year, the time of the second dentition. 4. Boyhood, up to the 
beginnings of puberty, some time about the thirteenth or four- 
teenth year. 5. Youth, up to the complete development of the 
body, or about 19-21 years. 6. Mature age, up to the beginning 
of the retouriin women, the climacteric) between the forty-fifth 
and the fiftieth year. 7. Later manhood aitd old age. Of these 
periods, 'the first five comprehend the time of growth, the 
sixth is the age of full corporeal and intellectual capacity and 
abiUty, while in the seventh there gradually occur disturbances 



72 THE CHILD 

in the structure and functions of the body, correlated with 
a greater or less degree of chronic morbid influences.' 

Camerer recognises two great periods of growth in the life 
of the child : i. The first year, and chiefly the first half of it ; 
2. From fourteen to seventeen years in boys, and from eleven 
to fourteen years in girls. The disturbance of the increase 
in weight at the beginning of the last quarter of the first 
year may be ascribed to the development of the teeth. Arti- 
ficially-nourished infants remain for the first half year con- 
siderably behind, are at the end of the first half year about 
one kilogram lighter than breast-fed children, but have come 
up to the average of the latter by the end of the first year 
(loi, p. 3). Camerer seeks to distinguish from the growth 
which takes place till the attainment of full development, the 
changes in height and weight which, under the influence of 
external circumstances, bring about in most men a slow, 
gradual increase of weight, etc. — a gradual alteration of the 
body, beginning with adult age and ceasing only with old age. 
Other period-divisions maybe found cited in Burk (91, p. 254). 

Mr Arthur Macdonald, in his 'Experimental Study of 
Children,' after ' comparing the results of Weissenberg and 
others,' concludes that the human body has the following six 
periods of growth (383, p. 11 29) : i. From birth to the sixth or 
eighth year. A period of very rapid growth — the body being 
more than twice as large at the end than at the beginning of it. 
2. From the eleventh to the fourtee?ith year. A period of slow 
growth. 3. From the sixteenth to the seventeenth year. A period 
marked by ' a sudden advance in growth, which is in relation 
with the development of puberty.' 4. Period of slow growth^ 
' extending up to thirty years for height, and up to fifty for chest- 
girth,' when ' growth in the proper sense has ceased.' 5. A period 
ofrest^ which, 'in normal conditions is from thirty to fifty years of 
age, and is one of full symmetrical development.' 6. Last period 
of life ^ 'characterised by a decrease in all dimensions of the 
body.' 

It is to be noted that these periods do not always fall at 
the same age, and that, moreover, all post-natal growth is to 
a very large extent the maturing of impulses received during 
foetal life, the intensity of which is demonstrated by the fact that 
the foetus at the end of the foetal life is 2500 times larger than 
the ovum out of which it has been developed. 

•John Huart (577, II. p. 438), the Spanish philosopher and 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 73 

physician of the sixteenth century, who recognised as the epoch 
oixQdJS>QVL^ par excellence, in the human being the years from thirty- 
three to fifty, held that childhood did not end at the same time 
with all men — with some the close of childhood was the twelfth, 
with others the fourteenth, and with others again the sixteenth 
year. With the last every epoch of their life was longer than 
with the others — their youth lasted till forty, their manhood till 
sixty, while eighty years saw the close of their old age. With 
those whose childhood had ended with the twelfth year, life was 
shorter in all respects ; their use. of reason, moreover, was preco- 
cious, as was also their loss of the power of imagination, 
while their beard and other physical marks were also early 
in appearance. 

Dr B. G. Alvarez distinguishes, after birth, the following 
periods of childhood (5, p. 10) : i. New-born child {recien 
jiacido), from birth to the fall of the remains of the umbilical 
cord and its cicatrisation, the last taking place at least by the 
fifteenth day of life, the former most frequently at about the 
fifth or sixth day after birth. 2. First childhood {primer a 
infancid), from the sixteenth day of life up to about the third 
year, period of completion of the first dentition with the 
appearance of the fifth group of teeth, the four second molars. 
Precocity and retardation of dentition seem largely pathological. 
3. Secofid childhood, from about the third to about the fifteenth 
year, when the sexual functions make their appearance, and the 
exuberance of life is not wholly self-centred. 

Adolescence, Dr Alvarez takes, in its etymological sense, to 
mean the period of growth, which, for him, includes not only 
all childhood, but the early years of adult life as well, extending 
at least to the twenty-fourth year. Adult he applies to man 
beyond the age of childhood. Dr Alvarez fairly represents 
modern Spanish writers. 

Anatomists, physiologists, and anthropologists, who have 
gone into detailed studies of the various parts and organs of 
the body, have found that all or nearly all of them have 
characteristic periods of growth and development, and certain 
periodicities of acceleration and retardation of growth and 
repose — concerning which something is said in another place 
where the questions of growth, variation, etc., are discussed. 
That these ' periods ' or ' epochs ' correspond to something in 
the history of the race can readily be believed. 

The ^Ages^ recognised by Medicine in the Child. — Accord- 



74 THE CHILD 

ing to Dr W. S. Christopher, of Chicago, there are, from the 
medical point of view, three critical periods in child-hfe : i. 
Infancy^ practically the first three years of life, 'with the 
gastro-enteric tract as the place of least resistance.' The use 
of the bottle seems one of the chief factors in the production 
of great infant mortalit}^ and ' nursing is as much a part of 
the reproductive process as the development of the child in 
utero.'* Exaggerated pathogenic influence has been ascribed 
to the process of cutting the teeth, ' which is practically without 
harm to the child, and the relationship between the dangers 
to child-life and the period of dentition is purely one of coin- 
cidence.' Food-poisons are the great danger here. 2. The 
fatigue period — from seven to nine years — a period during 
which ' fatigue occurs very readily, and one in which damage 
to the heart is likely to be produced.' Dilated heart, shortness 
of breath, and ' an appearance of general laziness ' (which, 
above all things .else, does not call for more exercise, but less 
labour and fatigue, less school-work and less forced expenditure 
of energy) are common at this time — the statistics of some 
32,800 school-children (aged 6-13 years) seem to show that 
' the child of seven fatigues less readily than the child of six, 
but the child of eight fatigues more readily than the child of 
either six or seven. The child of nine fatigues less readily than 
the child of eight, but has a fatigue limit about equal to that 
of a child of seven. As the years advance the readiness of 
fatigue diminishes materially ' [the tests were concerned with 
voluntary motor ability and muscle-strength] ' until the period 
of puberty is reached, when again fatigue more readily occurs 
than in the years immediately preceding.' 3. The period of 
puberty — in the girl between twelve and a half and fifteen and a 
half years \ in the boy somewhat later — a period characterised 
by danger to the reproductive organs, which are acquiring their 
potential strength, and to the brain, now subject to the great 
strain of school-hfe. During this period ' the amount of food 
demanded is much larger than immediately before or imme- 
diately after'; lack of it and excessive study mean sterile women 
by-and-by. 

Periods from the Point of View of Degeneracy. — Clouston, in 
his study of The Neuroses of Pevelopme7it {11^^ p. 12), makes four 
divisions of the developmental period of human Ufe, as follows: 
I. Formative and Embyronic Stage (Intra-Uterine life). 2. 
Period of most rapid Brain-Growth, Special Sense Education, 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 75 

Motor Co-ordinations and Speech (from birth up to seven 
years). 3. Period of Co-ordination of Motion and Emotion 
(from seven to thirteen). 4. Puberty and Adolescence (from 
thirteen to twenty-five). There can also be recognised 'a 
period of growth and development together from birth to 
seventeen years,' and 'a period of development alone without 
growth, from seventeen to full maturity at about twenty-five.' 
The 'functional and critical ages' within the developmental 
epoch, noted by Clouston, are : (a) the crisis of birth ; (d) the 
age of suckling ; (c) the age of dentition ; (d) that of fastest 
increase of brain-growth between four and seven ; (e) that of 
puberty ; (/) that of greatest proportional increase in general 
body bulk, height and weight next to the first year of life, 
between fourteen and seventeen ; (g) that of the gradual and 
steady maturity and solidification of the bones and tissues 
generally between eighteen and twenty-five ; (k) the period of 
the completion of the organism, structurally and functionally, 
sexually, reproductively and mental, about twenty-five. From 
the point of view of the study of degeneration-stigmata Dr W. 
C. Krauss (336, p. 56) divides the life-history of the individual 
into three epochs: i. Fre-7iatal. Here the evidence of de- 
generacy is teratological, and ' the causes underlying degeneracy 
from a physical and psychical standpoint are in the majority of 
cases identical with those, upon which the science of teratology 
rests. 2. Post-jiatal. Here the evidence is ' purely subjective 
or physical and functional ' — deviations of the general propor- 
tions of the body, peculiar forms of special parts, lack of 
functional activity of the general organs of the body, lack of 
functional activity of the special organs, developmental irregu- 
larities, including habits. 3. Fost-developmental. Here the 
evidence is mainly objective or psychical — mental, moral, sen- 
sual stigmata. 

Periods from the Point of Viezv of Physical Culture. — Dr E. 
M. Hartwell, of Boston, studying man from the point of view 
of physical training, and holding to the general thesis that 
' man's field of education is the nervous system,' in relation to 
periods of growth, maturity and decline, subdivides the period 
of immaturity, growth and evolution of maturity in the follow- 
ing fashion : i . From birth to the close of the eighth year. A 
period of imitation, inquisitiveness and acquisition, charac- 
terised by ' an immense growth of brain,' and the development 
of the sensory organs, perception and memory. A period when 



76 THE CHILD 

authority is needed, and where only 'easy and elementary 
games belong.' 2. From the ninth to about the end of the six- 
teenth year. A period characterised by growth in height and 
weight, muscles, and motor co-ordination ; the passage from 
the mental condition of childhood to the state of youth and 
manhood is marked by self-consciousness and the demand for 
reason. During this period physical education may be more 
varied and complicated, but no feats of extraordinary skill must 
be ventured upon. 3. Fivm the seventeenth to the end of the 
twenty fourth year. The period of established adolescence, when 
' the life of the race begins to be reflected in the life of the 
individual,' with distinctive development of character as well as 
of body and mind, and 'the co-ordination of the emotions 
with self-chosen aims and ideals.' The brain and the muscles 
are now practically full-grown, and reasonable 'great feats' 
may be attempted. In an interesting essay on ' Some Psychical 
Aspects of Muscular Exercise' (257), Dr Luther Gulick of 
Springfield, Mass., who sees in play a great factor in human 
gymnastics, makes the following divisions in pre-adult human 
life : I. Bat>yhood^ from birth to about the third year. Char- 
acterised by a love of such plays as rattling and mussing about 
paper, etc., picking, dropping, rolling, pushing, splashing sand, 
dirt, stones and the like. 2. Early childhood, from three to 
about seven. Marked by love for building with blocks, swing- 
ing, climbing, cutting, etc. Also by an interest in the latter 
portion of the period (by girls) in dolls, and an inquisitive but 
not sympathetic interest in ' bugs.' Before seven, also, ' children 
rarely play games spontaneously.' 3. Childhood., from seven to 
twelve. Characterised by the ' height of doll-play,' and elaborate 
house-keeping, together with the development of competition 
in boys' games. 4. Early adolescence., from twelve to seventeen. 
Marked by the development of group-games (ball, etc.), and of the 
predatory instincts. 5. Later adolescence. Marked ' by the extra- 
ordinary development of group-games to the limit of adolescence.' 
In early childhood games and exercises seem to be ' indi- 
viduahstic and non-competitive, and for the accomplishment 
and observation of objective results ' ; in later childhood, 
individuahstic and competitive, with active muscular correlation 
and sense-judgment ; in adolescence, socialistic, and character- 
ised by heathen endurance, self-control, loyalty, trust, etc., and 
by a predilection for such savage occupations as hmiting, fish- 
ing, and the like. 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 77 

Very interesting is the investigation of the periods or epochs 
in the development of the senses, of some of which extended 
studies have recently been made. 

Periods in the I)evelopme?it of the Senses {Smell, Colour). — 
The most extensive study of the sense of smell in children is 
Dr Adriano Garbini's ' Evolution of the Olfactive Sense in 
Infancy,' containing the results of investigations upon ten new- 
born babes and 415 children (girls 177, boys 238) between 
three and six years of age (234). 

In the olfactive development of the child, Dr Garbini 
recognises, in the first six years, six periods, which, with their 
distinctive characteristics, are : — 

I. Tactile Period — the first three hours of life. During this 
period, by reason of the thick stratum of mucus which covers 
the olfactive substance, the child suffers anosmia, and feels 
only tactile stimuli, which produce disagreeable impressions 
and are reacted to with reflex phenomena. 

II. Osmo-tactile Period — from about the third hour to about 
the fourth week. During this period the respiratory region of 
the new-born child is much more sensitive to stimuli of touch, 
easily reacting with sneezing, and he begins to have osmo- 
tactile sensations by means of acutely odorous substances 
(osmo-tactile substances), but has as yet no olfactive sensations. 

III. Osmo-gustative Period — from about the fourth week to 
about the fourteenth month. During this period the suckUng 
begins to have osmo-gustative sensations, perceiving the odour 
of milk, and differentiating the milk of his own mother or 
nurse from that of other women, and distinguishing by their 
odour alimentary substances. From odorous substances, if they 
are nauseous, he has reflex (but not odorous) stimuli at the 
stomach ; if they are fragrant or aromatic, no sensation. 

IV. Olfactive Period — from the fourteenth month to about 
the third year of life. During this period the child begins to 
experience true olfactive sensations. The first reactions to 
odorous substances occur in the fifteenth and sixteenth month, 
the nauseous first, then the rank odours, the aromatic and the 
balsamic. The mimetic reactions commence to vary according 
to the odours after the twentieth month, and between the nine- 
teenth and the twenty-second month the child begins to clearly 
distinguish odours from tastes. 

V. Co7itinuatio7t of the Fourth Period — the third year of life. 
During this period the mimetic reactions of the child, with the 



78 THE CHILD 

perception of odours stimuli, are less accentuated, and he has 
odorous perceptions of different substances with different inten- 
sities of olfactive stimulus. 

VI. Fourth^ Fifth a7id Sixth Years of Life. — During this period 
the child gains something in qualitative perception of odorous 
stimuli, and makes progress in correlating the olfactive percep- 
tions, and the corresponding verbal expressions. Here appears 
also the ability to discern the different intensities of the same 
odour, but with an average olfactive acuteness very weak (6.3) 
as compared with that of the adult (2.9); moreover, the reaction 
time can be two and a half times as long as that of adults. Girls 
seem to have a slightly more acute sense of smell than boys. 

In the ontogenetic development of the olfactive functions, 
according to Garbini, we have ' a perfect repetition of the phylo- 
genetic evolution,' and in the child we can note 'in the pro- 
gressive order of development of the nasal mucose membrane the 
following stages, tactile, osmo-tactile, osmo-gustative, olfactive, 
corresponding to the four phylogenetic stages met with in the 
Protozoa, the invertebrate Metazoa, the Vertebrates with bron- 
chial respiration, and the higher Vertebrates.' And being late 
to appear in the animal series, the sense of smell develops late 
in the child, while the general neglect of exercise and develop- 
ment of the olfactive sense in adults has a strong (hereditary) 
influence in hindering its acute development. Garbini strongly 
advises ' a gymnastic of the sense of smell ' for children — exer- 
cises, arranged in the order of phylogenetic growth, which shall 
improve and strengthen the child's perception, a useful and 
justifiable departure, he thinks, from the over-driven 'play- 
system ' of the kindergarten. 

To the same investigator we owe an excellent study of the 
evolution of the sense of colour in young children, giving the 
results of numerous and detailed experiments upon 557 Italian 
children (girls 247, boys 310) between the ages of three and 
six years (233). 

Garbini points out that too much importance must not be 
laid on individual cases (Preyer, Binet), while the ' recognition ' 
method depends too much upon the uncertain factor of atten- 
tion and the unstable one of memory. The author, therefore, 
used together the silent method (matching the colour given to 
the child) and the name method, upon a large number of 
children. He recognises in the life of the child as studied 
by him six periods, with their characteristics, as follows ; — 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 79 

I. Photo dispheiHc Period.— Yroxn birth up to about the fifth 
day of hfe. The new-born child, by reason of retinal hyper- 
sesthesia, bears light badly, and while feeling light, does not 
perceive its elements, and from luminous impressions has only 
internal sensations of greater or less agreeableness ; is, in fact, 
photophobic — opening its eyes in the dark or in shadow. 

II. PhotocBsthesic Period. — From about the fifth to about 
the thirtieth day of Hfe. Commencing, from the fifth to the 
seventh day, to be pleasurably impressed by diffused light, the 
infant becomes clearly photophile between the tenth and the 
twenty-fifth day. From luminous impressions he has photo- 
gesthesic sensations supplied by simple perceptions of light 
and dark. 

III. Visive Period. — From the fifth week to about the 
eighteenth month of Hfe. The little child enters upon the 
development of visive perceptions properly so called. He 
distinguishes more and more light and dark, and begins to 
differentiate white from black and from grey. He commences to 
have visive perceptions, at distances less than a metre, between 
the twenty-eighth and the thirty-fifth day. He begins to be 
able, by the seventh week, to follow an object slowly displaced, 
and by the fifth month to follow others with more rapid 
movements. 

IV. Chro7natic Period. — From the sixteenth to the twenty- 
fourth month of life. The child continues to have more and 
more delicate photoaesthesic and visive perceptions, and begins 
to have the first chromatic perceptions — red and green. 

V. Continuation of No. IV. — From the second to the third 
year of life. The child continues to improve its perceptions of 
red and green ; begins to differentiate yellow and has the first 
(not yet definite) impressions of orange, blue, violet. He can 
name quite correctly red, less exactly green, and badly the 
other colours. 

VI. Continuatio7i of No. V. — From the fourth to the sixth 
year of life. The child completes the fitting out of the 
chromatic perceptivity, becoming sufficiently famihar with the 
distinction of orange, blue, violet. At the same time he 
becomes more and more familiar with the correlation between 
the colour perceptions and the corresponding verbal expressions, 
not one of which, however, can as yet be said to be perfect 
with him. 

In reality, at the end of the sixth year the chromatic 



8o THE CHILD 

development is still in its first stages ; at that period about 
2 per cent, of all children are unable to name any colour, and 
only 35 per cent, are able to name all six well. 

The influence of sex upon the growth of the colour-sense 
in early childhood is not very great. In the fourth year it 
seems to be more developed in boys, in the fifth and sixth years 
in girls. In the fourth, fifth and sixth years the average sense 
for red, green, yellow, orange is greater in boys, while the sense 
for blue and violet — the last colours perceived in the chro- 
matic evolution — is greater in girls. A noteworthy fact is that 
'the order in which the child learns to connect the verbal 
expressions with their corresponding chromatic perceptions is 
identical with the successive order of the latter, viz., red, green, 
yellow, orange, blue, violet.' But these two series of pheno- 
mena are parallel, not synchronous, the power to correlate 
expression (verbal) and perception coming about a year later 
than the perception of the colours themselves. This lack of 
synchronism between chromatic perceptions and their verbal 
expressions is due, according to Garbini, to the fact that the 
latter ' belong to a psychic phenomenon of a higher order than 
that of the former.' 

Psychic Periods, — Lesshaft, who has investigated types of 
character and temperament, recognises five periods in human 
life : (i) Chaos period — the new-born child ; (2) Reflex- 
ratiofial — till the use of speech, about the second year ; (3) 
Co?icrete imitatio?i period — up to school age ; (4) Abstract 
imitatioji period — up to about twenty years ; (5) Critico-creative 
period — ripe age of man. 

Dr Paul Valentin, from the point of view of developmental 
psychology, thus divides the life of the child (658) : — 

I. Insti?ictive Period — the first few months of life. Psychic 
life is affective only during the first few weeks and up to 
the third month (after which some vague knowledge begins) 
the child is what Virchow terms 'a spinal reflex being.' 

II. Imitative Period — up to the sixth or seventh year. 
During this epoch the suckling changes to the real child, and 
the young human being slowly grows out of the absolute 
domination of the emotional element. 

III. Attentive Period — from about seven years till puberty 
occurs. This is the attentive epoch of intellectual development 
controlled by the sense of personal eff'ort, the most important 
factor in adaptation to the milieu. 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 8 1 

In these three epochs the child from an animal becomes 
a man ; those who are incapable of responding to this pliable, 
moulding process are degenerates. Here heredity, unless it is 
pathological, can be conquered, for it has nothing absolutely 
fatal about it. 

Functional Periods ; Social Epochs. — Dr Guibert, accepting 
the view that, in certain diseases of the nervous system, ' the 
more recent acquisitions, the higher, more perfect faculties, are 
the first to disappear, while the last so to do are the more 
rudimentary functions of the beginnings of life,' recognises four 
periods in childhood and youth as characterised by successive 
developments of functional aptitudes and mental functions, 
which periods in reverse order represent the course of decay in 
mental disorders and senility generally. These periods are, 
briefly, as follows (256, p. 714) : — 

I. Period of Subjective and Instiitctive Life. — This sub- 
jective or instinctive life (conscious or not), which may not 
require the active intervention of the cerebral cortex, but 
only that of the medulla, and perhaps of the nervous 
ganglia at the base of the encephalon, is all that exists in 
the new-born infant and in certain hydrocephalic individuals — 
a period of purely reflex activity. Here are 'incoherent 
manifestations of elementary aptitudes, without any subordina- 
tion or complex functional determination,' and subjective life 
comprises ' the gamut of sensations, impressions, instinctive 
needs, automatic unco-ordinated movements, incompletely and 
imperfectly co-ordinated movements determined by needs to 
be satisfied, emotions to be manifested.' The manifestations 
of this period are developed by ' progressive differentiation 
and adaptation,' and the subjective life is not suppressed by 
the superposition of the functional aptitudes of succeeding 
periods, but 'constitutes the basis and foundation without 
which such functions could neither arise nor be developed.' 
Among the more or less abnormal or pathological manifesta- 
tions of the subjective life are dreaming, hallucination, dehrium, 
etc., which under certain circumstances remain to disturb pro- 
foundly the regular phenomena of objective, social and 
professional life. 2. Period of Objective Life. Beginning 
generally before the sixth month of the child's existence. 
Greater utilisation of the brain is indicated here by the 
aptitudes which go to make up the objective life of the period. 
Automatic or instinctive exteriorisation (afterwards conscious 

F 



82 THE CHILD 

and effective) ; automatic or instinctive recognition (then 
effective and conscious) ; prehension (aftervv'ards active) ; 
walking (afterwards active and certain) ; natural language and 
family life, the necessary preface of the succeeding period. 
The majority of the so-called higher animals have had their 
mental evolution arrested at this period, and at its beginning 
we find also arrested the idiots who are termed automatic, who, 
unable to adapt themselves to savage or semi-savage life, much 
less to civiUsed life, seem to belong to the human race only 
with the body, not the brain. 3. Period of Social Life, This 
period is marked by the instinctive imitation which gives birth 
to morals, customs ; the echolalia, which, in the child, precedes 
concrete language ; understood language, spoken language ; 
more vigilant and attentive aptitude for exteriorisation 
(social), games, dance, group-walking, gymnastics, hunting, 
fishing, agriculture, breeding, construction of huts, com- 
bined efforts of several individuals ; foresight and collective 
experience ; aptitude for school life, for attention, for voluntary 
intellectual efforts, reading, elementary writing; aptitude for 
recognising empiric genera and species transmitted by 
language ; the aptitude (with the provision of tools, clothing, 
food, weapons) for tribal, savage or semi-savage life — the result 
of preceding functional aptitudes come to their habitual 
development. The apes (especially the anthropomorphic), by 
virtue of their instinct of imitation, and the more intelligent of 
the microcephalic idiots (who reach the chatter of infants) may 
be said to have advanced a little into this period, while 
imbeciles, the majority of savage and half-savage men, together 
with not a few men living in the midst of civilisation, are 
arrested in their mental development in this third period, 
remaining refractory to the mass of abstract ideas, the in- 
telligence and culture of the next epoch. 4. Period of Pro- 
fessiojial and Scie?itific Life. The functional aptitudes of this 
period, methodic exteriorisation, attention, professional and 
scientific observation; recognition, determination of varieties, 
species, genera, natural families scientifically or empirically 
established ; aptitude for natural classifications, scientific and 
professional nomenclatures and abstractions ; aptitude for 
civilised life, liberal professions, abstract, intellectual life, and, 
a fortiori, aptitude for intelligent apprenticeship, for pro- 
fessional, free, provident, perfectible exercise. 

In all the period of progress one must suppose ' the 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 83 

gradual intervention of new centres, more and more specialised, 
which, from the state of inertia and functional torpor in which 
they are still plunged at birth, must submit to the action of 
repeated and concordant excitations, passing by the progressive 
evolution of their constituent elements to an active state.' 

A good deal of valuable reasoning along lines not vastly 
dissimilar may be found in Tarde, Baldwin, Giddings and 
other writers who have taken up the consideration of imitation, 
and the social development of the individual and the race. 
Inspired by Baldwin, in some respects, is the investigation 
of the 'institutional activities' of American children by Mr H. 
D. Sheldon, who finds that the years of childhood from four to 
fourteen contain two distinctly marked periods. i. Period of 
imitatiofi. From four to ten. Characterised by 'free spon- 
taneous imitation of every form of adult institution,' the child 
responding easily and sympathetically to his environment. 
Family, store, church, school, etc., are all, sometimes naively, 
sometimes very ingeniously, imitated. 2. Period of invention. 
From ten to fourteen. Characterised by ' less imitation and 
play, and more invention and following of instinct.' Among 
boys there is ' a tendency to form social units characteristic 
of lower stages of civilisation ' — predatory organisation, 'street 
gangs,' with imitation ceremonies sometimes of savage sort, 
discipline, esprit de coips, etc., corresponding (588). 

Stages ifi the Development of the Imagination. — The 
' Evolution of the Imagination ' has been discussed by Dr V. 
Giuffrida-Ruggeri (245) upon the basis of the most recent 
studies and researches of Binet, Speranski, Thomas, Paulhan, 
Dugas, Ribot, Philippe; Baldwin, Fouillee, Ambrosi, etc. 
Adopting Binet's definition of imagination as ' the faculty of 
creating groups of images which do not correspond to any 
external reality,' the author outlines the story of its develop- 
ment thus : — 

I. Simply Objective Stage. — Exemplified in the early 
Greek legends, where metamorphosis (corresponding to the 
real mechanism of reasoning) constitutes almost all the 
mechanism, illustrating the fact that even the brilliant imagina- 
tion of this wonderful people, no less than other mental 
products, can be led back to a process of reasoning ; and in 
' the objective imagination of children, improperly called 
" creative," since it creates nothing, but transforms, through the 
wonted mechanism, animating sticks, changing leaves of trees 



84 THE CHILD 

into dishes,' etc. Here also 'the collective mind reflects the 
individual mind by magnifying it — the luxuriating cycle of 
Greek legends, true spring of voluntary illusions, corresponds 
to what sleep is in the individual, the true type of meta- 
morphosis-hallucinations,' and to the phenomena of waking 
sleep, reverie, etc. The metamorphosis of the early Greek 
legends 'is not merely a transition from the known to the 
unknown, not merely the extension of an anterior knowledge, 
but is also a classification, the first classification, perhaps, ever 
made in Greece. Transformation into animals generally 
indicates deterioration, as does metamorphosis into rocks ; 
while transformation into plants (flow^ers, particularly) is almost 
a passage into a better life; transformation into streams or 
fountains seems of ambiguous value, and metamorphosis into 
stars is always reserved for the most markedly deserving and 
the most brilliant glories.' Although the ' master road ' of Greek 
imagination is metamorphosis, the idea of contrast plays its 
role also, and that factor, so common in childhood, which 
Baldwin has denominated ' suggestion by contradiction.' 

II. Schematic Stage. — Although the imagination, ' in its 
simple form is a logical conclusion, it also forms part of a 
delirium, the evolution and complication of w^hose mechanism 
is wonderfully aided by schematic figures (or groups of figures) 
or images — a schematic figure ("eyes of fire," "words of fire," 
etc.) is a figure of manifold attributes, not confined merely to 
one or two resemblances.' Our whole intellectual life, and the 
intellectual life of peoples as well, are full of these schematic 
figures, resumes of a long series of experiences. The schematic 
stage is chiefly important in art, 'which, objectively considered, 
reaches its relative perfection when the oscillations dependent 
upon the diverse individual conceptions are reduced to a 
minimum.' The process of reduction by which the schematic 
figure is reached appears in Philippe's experiments on the trans- 
formation of mental images, in which the unconscious com- 
parison of a figure (retraced after some length of time) with 
pre-existing images, results in the elimination of a number of 
the perceptions which were part of the old design, and we have 
at last a very simple and clearly-defined scheme. Just as a 
child prefers a wax doll to a marble doll, so we are less pleased 
with the best made figure in wax than with a statue of marble, 
not (as Speranski thinks) by reason of its greater likeness to 
reality, but on account of the clash with the pre-existing plastic 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 85 

scheme. This schematic stage of the imagination is revealed 
in very many Greek legends and myths (the banquet of Atreus, 
Pelops, Areas and Tereus ; the challenge of Hippodamia and 
Atalanta ; the calumny of Hippolytus, Bellerophon, Phryxus, 
etc.), and has analogies in the gest of the wandering knight of 
the Middle Ages. It is of greatest importance in literary com- 
positions, novels, etc. 

III. Symbolic Stage. — When, in the process of reduction of 
its attributes undergone by an image (or a group of im.ages), it 
is removed from the sphere of concrete facts into that of 
abstract, we have the foundation of a symbol ; wings, e.g., 
come to signify not alone speed, but desire, pleasure, curiosity, 
daring, genius, thought, time, etc. In the poems of Goethe 
and the music of Wagner, the dramas of Ibsen and the pictures 
of the symbolists, groups (more or less complex) of figures 
correspond to as many symbols. Examples of products of the 
imagination in the symbolic stage are also the ancient fables 
and the enigmas of Pythagoras, but not the personifications of 
the old myths, for animism is something else than the result of 
abstraction. Experimental proofs of the mechanism of the 
symbolic stage of the imagination are revealed by hypnotism, 
the symbohsm developed, e.g., from the placing of the hands to 
suggest the scheme of prayer. An expression (a Hne of Racine, 
e.g.) may be schematic or symbolic, ugly or beautiful, according 
as the reader's imagination is in the schematic stage (with con- 
crete images) or in the symbolic stage (with abstract elements). 
As the concrete yields more and more to the abstract, the 
brilliant metaphors gradually become more and more empty 
formula, following the general law of senility, the words losing 
first a portion then all of their significance. 

The evolution of the imagination is nowhere, however, 
better exhibited, the author thinks, than in the story of the 
rise, development and decadence of the religious sentiment : 
' In the great religions of classic antiquity, when the external 
world was reflected in the yet infantile mind of man, as in a 
mirror we see the imagination in its splendid phantasmagoric 
objective phase. In the Middle Ages, when the religious senti- 
ment reached its chief paroxysm, the imagination became 
schematic. Finally, when religion is on the way to become 
one of the many social conveniences, the imagination turns 
symbolical.' 

Spencer's distinction between the 'reproductive' and the 



S6 THE CHILD 

'constructive' imagination, a distinction adopted by many 
other psychologists — as examples of ' reproductive ' imagination, 
have been cited, the infant's recognition of the maternal breast, 
its sudden turning at hearing a bird sing, its brightening up 
when the nurse puts on a walking dress, the fact of saying 
' papa ' at the sight of any man — is rejected by Dr Giuffrida- 
Ruggeri, these things not differing sufficiently from the ordinary 
forms of association to deserve a separate name, or from 
memory. Fouillee, indeed, holds that 'reproductive imagina- 
tion is not distinguished from memory.' Wundt's distinction 
of 'active' and 'passive' imagination he deems preferable. At 
the basis of the process of reduction involved in the evolution 
of the imagination lies the ' law of least effort,' to which Ferrero, 
in his study of the psychology of symbolism, has attached so 
much importance and so well illustrated, and imagination itself 
belongs to the second — epoch of objective reference — sub- 
division of mental development according to Baldwin, and 
' its appearance coincides with the appearance of the diffuse, 
irregular, aimless, and powerfully pleasant or painful move- 
ments originating in the superabundance of nervous tonality, 
and the luxuriousness of vital energy, which invades the being 
free from the fearful contemplation of the ego so weak in 
respect to the environment. Indeed, the imagination, itself, at 
this stage, an inevitable reaction to the stimuli of the environ- 
ment, is one form of such movements.' 

In connection with the part played in the schematic 
imagination by the data of the eye and ear, in which the 
representative element dominates all images, the author re- 
marks that ' the imagination of the deaf-mute never passes the 
schematic stage,' his imaginative patrimony being, probably, 
more deficient than that of the born-blind. 

Ribot divides the history of the evolution of general ideas 
in the individual and the race into the following stages : i. 
Pre-lingual. Seen in animals, children, deaf-mutes. 2. Word- 
idea. Seen in primitive races of man — here the ideas are 
accompanied by words, and an increasingly important role 
attaches to language. 3. Classifactory afid scientific. In this 
stage occurs the complete substitution of words for ideas (535). 

Religions Periods of Childhood. — Dr Oscar Chrisman, in his 
essay on 'Religious Periods of Child-Growth' (in), divides 
child-life into five periods: (i) Pre-natal (from conception to 
birth) ; (2) Infancy (from birth to the obtaining of temporary 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 8/ 

teeth, at about 2 J years of age) ; (3) Childhood (from the 
obtaining of temporary teeth to the obtaining of permanent 
teeth at about 10 years of age); (4) Pubescence (from the 
gaining of permanent teeth to ' the time of the initial develop- 
ment of the function of reproduction, in girls at about the age 
of 12-13 years, in boys 15-16 years) ; ' (5) Adolescence (from the 
initial development to the attainment of the full perfection of 
the reproductive energy at about 25 years of age). 

The stages of growth, suggested by Dr E. D. Starbuck, who 
has investigated the data of conversion and the psychological 
aspects of religion, are (611, p. 124): 'Childhood, the seed- 
time, up to twelve or thirteen ; the beginning of youth, the 
time of germination, in which new life comes in a great wave 
at fourteen or fifteen, and its two wavelets, just before and 
just after the large one; next, youth, the growing time, in 
which the life forces are being sifted, readjusted and combined ; 
by twenty-four and twenty-five the person has worked out a 
point of view, an individual insight, and become a positive 
factor in the reHgious life of the world. Each stage should be 
a preparation for the next, so that the person may merge 
naturally and evenly into a strong, beautiful, spiritual manhood 
or womanhood.' Moreover, according to Dr Starbuck (610, 
p. 272), 'the years of greatest frequency of conversions corre- 
spond with periods of greatest bodily growth for both males 
and females,' and there is 'a correspondence between the 
periods of most frequent conversions and puberty in both 
sexes.' 

Periods of Grotvth of the Historic Sense. — From a study 
of the 'historic sense among children,' Mrs Mary S. Barnes 
(36, p. 92) finds indications of three periods of historical 
interest and activity in the young human being, the ' historical 
sense ' appearing at least as early as seven. These epochs 
are : (i) Frofii seven or eight to about tzvelve or thirteen — the 
period of ' striking biographies and events.' The biographies, 
themselves the basis of chronology, ' should be chosen from 
the field of action and interest allied to children's lives,' in 
other words, they should be taken from ' the personal, military 
and cultural aspects of history, and scarcely at all from the 
political or intellectual life.' (2) From fourteen or fifteen up to 
about entra?ice to college, or after — the period of interest in ' the 
statesman, thinkers, poets, as successors to the explorers and 
fighters of the earlier period ' ; of interest in, and thought 



88 THE CHILD 

about, ' the concrete embodiments of a time, its documents, 
monuments, men and books ' ; of the beginning of reading 
between the lines, of criticism, etc. (3) College years — ' the 
age of monographic special study ' ; the time when one needs 
to and can make ' the collection, comparison, criticism of 
sources themselves.' 

Periods of Laiu Recognition. — The investigations of Pro- 
fessor Earl Barnes and Miss Estelle M. Darrah (145, p. 258) 
concerning ' children's attitude toward law,' seem to make 
clear the existence of two very diverse epochs during the 
period from seven years onward, as follows (the children in 
question are American, largely Californian) : i. From six or 
seven to from ten to twelve — the period of law-ignoring ; of 
little regard, or appreciation for general laws and regulations ; 
of arbitrary and severe reactions against the misdoings of 
others, of revenge-punishment, and atonement by suffering ; 
of obedience to personal authority, not to rule or law ; the 
period of outraged feelings and vague ideas. 2. From about 
twelve (the change may begin at ten, and is more rapid 
between twelve and thirteen) to about sixteen — after this the 
tendencies of the period increase with the years. The period 
of law recognition (personal authority is replaced by obedience 
to rule and law) ; of self-knowledge of feelings, of moderation 
in punishment, and recognition to some extent of the inten- 
tions of the offender. There is, even here, however, ' little 
recognition of a corrective aim in punishment,' traces of such 
appearing ' only in the later years, and then in comparatively 
few cases.' Up to ten years of age, at least, the school-children 
should be governed by personal authority and not by law, 
rule and regulation, 'each infraction of the law of right 
and each act of disobedience being treated on its individual 
merits.' 

Migratory and Truant Periods. — Dr L. W. Kline, who has 
investigated the phenomena of truancy, migration, running 
away, etc., in childhood, finds that there are three periods, 
' each differentiated from the other by certain characteristics, 
impulses and activities' (328, p. 395). These periods are as 
follows : — 

I. From the Time of being able to Walk easily to about the 
Third or Fourth Year. — This period, which is ' common to all 
children, regardless of home life or physical conditions,' is 
' characterised by aimlessness, openness and unconsciousness 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 89 

of danger or any wrong,' while ' during their little escapade 
some very primitive, as well as semi-barbaric, practices crop 
out, e.g., chasing and capturing animals, begging, taking 
things that please their fancy,' etc. Fifty cases of this period 
were studied. 

2. J^rom the Fourth to the Seventh Year inclusive. — This 
period, in which the child's likes and dislikes appear, and 
he is influenced by loneliness at home, lack of toys, and other 
amusements, by the abuse or cruelty and neglect of parents 
(though firm and proper home treatment will break the 
runaway habit) is marked by ' a dominating love for play and 
companions, and outdoor life.' This is the 'period of 
curiosity, the age of attempts, and a sort of diffused universal 
interest for nature and man.' At this time the child is 
attracted by all things, 'seeks the acquaintance of any and 
everybody, enjoys new sights and the unexpected, likes to do 
new things as a test of his courage, and to make explorations 
into new vicinities.' Toward the close of this period and the 
beginning of the next (although ' an occasional truant is born 
in the sixth or seventh year ') many children give up the habit 
altogether, for now ' focussing down of interests, a growing 
love for parents, attachment to certain groups of playmates, 
fondness for school-work and teacher, are all forces overcoming 
and destroying this powerful relic of primitive man.' Eighty 
cases of this period were studied. 

3. From the Eighth to the Twelfth Year inclusive. — At this 
time ' the child frequently abandons the habit altogether, due 
to the influence and integrity of the home, or he begins it in 
serious form for the first time in life, due to incompetent 
parents and an unattractive home, or to the impulse itself 
which dominates all his life activities, unfitting him to wrestle 
with fortune and destroying the desire to do so.' During this 
period the child is influenced by his impulsiveness, lack of per- 
sistence, impatience of restraint, carelessness of person, indiffer- 
ence towards property, lack of sympathy with society and its 
movements, etc. In a word, ' he stands out like an outcrop 
of an older formation, pointing the genetic psychologist back 
to the probable origin of the migrating instinct.' One hundred 
and twenty cases of this period were studied. 

Criminological Periods of Childhood, — From the standpoint 
of penology Dr Appelius, omitting the early years of infancy, 
where parental control and restraint of incipient crime suffice, 



90 THE CHILD 

recognises three epochs in the Hfe of the immature man : ia) 
from the sixth to the twelfth year ; {b) from the twelfth to the 
sixteenth year ; (c) from the sixteenth to the close of the 
eighteenth year (14, p. ^^). From the first two periods the 
usual crime-punishments should be rigorously excluded, but 
in the last the criminal actions of youths stand in very close 
relations to those of adults. No sharply-marked boundary 
can be noted between childhood and youth, but in general 
the frontier lies about the twelfth year, when sexual maturity 
(with its developmental changes) begins. Judicial punishment 
of children is not to be thought of, and in the period between 
the ages of twelve and sixteen, when criminal offences are" 
largely the reflex of individual development, not so much 
the product of the general impulse of youth, which comes 
somewhat later, removal from bad parental and family environ- 
ment, with transference to an educational and reformatory 
institution controlled by the State. For youthful criminals 
between sixteen and eighteen, imprisonment, reprimand, 
school-discipline, fine, .are among the forms of punishment 
allowable, but not the modern prison -punishments. Ur 
Appelius thinks that the limit for the beginning of punishment 
should be raised to the end of the fourteenth year, and the 
end of the disposition of neglected children be made the end 
of the sixteenth year. Individuals under fourteen years of 
age lack, in most cases, moral maturity, and a crime-punish- 
ment can hardly with justice be meted out to them. This 
moral maturity is usually present in individuals between 
fourteen and sixteen ; in individuals over sixteen years of 
age, general responsibility may be assumed, as well as the 
presence of moral maturity. 

Dr Aschrott, the keynote of whose argument lies in the 
declaration 'a child who is still going to school does not 
belong in prison' (15, p. 22), is also strongly in favour of the 
fourteenth year limit. At least the close of school-childhood 
ought to precede the beginning of criminal youth and man- 
hood. The same recommendation was made by the committee 
of the International Criminological Congress at Halle in 1891, 
who took the view that ' no individual who has not yet 
completed his or her fourteenth year should be judicially 
punished for the commission of a punishable action, State- 
superintended education being here the remedy to be pursued ' 
(14, p. 201). The views of the committee were adopted by 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 9I 

the Conference held in BerHn in December 1891, and have 
received general adhesion in Germany (14, p. 233). 

Periods of Vocal Evolution. — Nowhere more, perhaps, do 
the divisions and epochs appear to better (or to worse) 
advantage than in the evolution of the voice and speech of 
the child. The evolution of the voice in children up to the 
age of six has been carefully studied by Dr Adriano Garbini, 
who sums up the result of his researches as follows (232) : — 

I. Neiv-hor?i Child. — First cries (reflex), without individual 
tone j height between fo? and /rt^, intensity weak, duration 
very brief (about 60 times per minute). II. First two mo7iths. 
— Inarticulate cries ; appearance of the voice. Tone nasal 
and common to all ; height between fd^ and fa^^ intensity 
strong, duration less brief (about 40 times per minute). III. 
From the second to the eighth month. — Appearance of the artic- 
ulate voice. Tone not yet individualised, intensity stronger, 
height between do'^ and do^, duration longer (about 27 times 
per minute). IV. From the eighth to the eighteenth month. — 
Rapid increase in the variety of sound. Appearance of 
modulation, individual tone, intensity weaker, height between 
do"^ and do^. V. Fro7?z the eighteenth to the twenty-fourth month. — 
Larynx more consolidated, more definite sonorous qualities, 
height less, uncertain reproduction of some notes. Prattle sung 
between si^ and mi"^. VI. From two to three years. — Entrance 
into the field of vocal extension, with possible limits re^-la^. 
Correct intonation oimi^ and/fl:^ First differentiation of the 
two registers. Diminution in the intensity of cries, increase 
in that of the singing voice. The tone becomes more and more 
individualised, and the first sexual difference appears. Trans- 
formation of the singing prattle into rhythmic and remotely 
melodic phrases. Difficult and inexact repetition of some 
musical phrases. VII. From three, to six years. — Well-marked 
vocal extension, with possible limits la-re''-'., sol-mi'^. Physio- 
logical extension of four tones for girls and five for boys. 
Perfect distinction between the two registers and the ' voix de 
passage ' j chest-voice with potential maximum at fa^ in girls, 
mi^ in boys, head-voice with potential maximum, at si^ for both 
sexes, except between three and four years, when it is at la^ — 
the ' voix de passage ' varying in girls about two notes {soP-., la^), 
and in boys about three {fa^, sol^^ laS). Increasing intensity of 
the singing voice, at the maximum in the sharps, weak in the 
bass. Tone inherent in age and sex as with children of 



92 THE CHILD 

between two and three years of age. Individual tone more 
and more accentuated — general type of tone, ' chiaro,' not too 
harmonic. Exact repetition of songs and melodies. Musical 
ear well developed for enharmonic intonation. 

Linguistic Sensory-Motor Fe7'iods. — Berthold Sigismund, 
physician, naturalist, teacher and poet, in 1856, published, 
under the title Child and World (600), a genial and sug- 
gestive account of the growth and development of his own 
little boy. Before he began to write he was evidently well 
acquainted with the folk-lore and the folk-observation of child- 
hood, and it is to him that we owe the introduction into the 
literature of child-study of the term 'stupid quarter' — das 
dumme Vierteljahr (compare the Latin iiifaits) — by which the 
Thuringian peasants designated the first three months of 
human existence. A keen observer of child-endeavour and 
actual physical and intellectual progress, Sigismund, noting 
the chief developmental facts involved, assigned to the child 
in the various stages of its growth these expressive names 
(the others of the list being formed by analogy with the first) : 
I. 6'(2>/^//;?^ (' suckling'), the period of the first three months, 
when the child is seemingly stupid, and, as it were, part of the 
mother still. 2. Ldchlifig ('little smiler'), the period in which 
the development of Virgil's risu cognoscei^e matixni takes place 
(the smile, Sigismund thought, began between the seventh and 
the tenth week). 3. Sehling (' little seer ' ), the period in which 
the organ of sight comes more or less under control, and the 
' wise look ' of the child really means something. 4. Gi-eifling 
(' little gripper'), the period in which gripping and grasping (the 
first step, as language — German, begreifen; Latin, apprehendere — 
tells us, towards comprehension), and the use of the hand as a 
human organ develop. 5. Ldujlijig' (^ \iti\e. walker'), the period 
(earlier the child is KriecMi7tg, ' little creeper ') in which the 
child has learned to stand freely and to walk (according to 
Sigismund, the acquisition of the power to walk takes place 
between the end of the first year and the end of the first 
quarter of the second year). 6. Sprechling ('little speaker'), 
the period when the child has begun to use the most human 
of all man's accomplishments, and ceases to be, in the 
original Latin sense of the term, an infant^ becoming speaking 
man. 

Another classification of the epochs of childhood suggested 
by Sigismund is — From birth to the first smile ; from smiling 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 93 

to sitting ; from sitting to walking ; from walking to speaking ; 
from word to sentence. 

Sigismund's divisions of the periods of childhood have been 
practically adopted by Fritz Schultze in his evolutionistic study 
of ' The Child's Language' (581). 

Linguistic Periods. — Kussmaul recognises three periods or 
stages of development in the articulation of the child : I. The 
period of pri7nitive sounds^^oxm^'Si of a 'wild,' reflex sort, in all 
sorts of loose and chance successions and combinations ; some 
the regular sounds of the alphabet, other of a much more difficult 
sort, reminding one of certain sounds in modern folk-speech and 
the tongues of savage peoples {pji,fbu, tl, dsi, qr, etc.). These 
sounds are the product of the muscle-instinct of the child, like 
its hand-clapping, its leg-kicking and other seemingly aimless 
exertions. There is a joyance of babbling fully equal to any 
joyance of movement the infant can feel. 11. The imitative 
period^ beginning in some children before the end of the first 
year, in others not clearly noticeable till well on into the second 
year, or even later. Here the language of the child's environ- 
ment makes its influence felt, and the ' wildness ' of its former 
artless babble is shaped (when the child is capable of listening 
and distinguishing tones) into something like the commonly 
used sounds of its elders. The «, aa^ ho., u, natural inter- 
jections, have now added to them baba^ dada, dodo, atta, papa, 
mama, bebe, etc., words to which, however, much haziness of 
meaning long attaches. During this period the first awakening 
of the musical sense causes the child to give utterance to un- 
counted repetitions of his favourite words, and at the same 
time the words used by him shape themselves more and more 
to the phonetics of those about him, and less of the parent's 
divining instinct is needed to interpret their significations. 
III. T]ie period of thought-expression. Here the child is busied 
with the connection of word and idea, the change from mere 
onomatopoeia and interjection to the real speech-word (342, 
p. 46). 

Such periods as these, however, as Gutzmann points out 
(260, p. 12), are not always sharply indicated; some highly- 
gifted children at the age of three years hardly speak at all, 
while undoubted idiots are sometimes characterised by a 
perfect stream of babble. Perhaps there is no inconsiderable 
difference in the individual abilities of children to hear their 
own sounds, and the pleasure-element resulting from play with 



94 THE CHILD 

the voice is subject to wide variations. Hence, also, variation 
in the power and scope of imitation, for which the child finds 
preparation in listening to itself, as well as to others at a later 
period. Though the difficulties of imitation are very great, the 
child profits by his good powers of observation, and often 
makes surprising advances ; but no fixed conclusion as to the 
intelligence of the young human being can be drawn from the 
observation of a few peculiarities of speech and their develop- 
ment. Not alone 'j^aby-talk,' on the part of parents and 
nurses, may, grace to the child's amazing talent for imitation, 
do his growing speech serious injury, but also forced attempts 
at hurrying on his language, especially where any defects of 
speech are present in the persons of his immediate environ- 
ment. Another possible cause of injury is the interference of 
parents and nurses with the child's babble and play-talk ; and 
at an opposite pole from the lullaby, which is so similar all 
over the world, we have the noise and din of the schoolroom, 
which to the ear-learning child means much of evil, the tone 
of voice and speech-action being often very much affected, w^hile 
a very large percentage of stuttering and like disturbances of lan- 
guage is directly traceable to the contamination of the school, 
the greater family. Nor can the use of language in childhood 
serve as a sure criterion of intelligence, for it has not seldom 
happened that in the same family a child of five years, though 
quite as intelligent as his brother or sister, has, so far as the 
proper and skilful handling of speech is concerned, lagged 
behind one of three, and, if Gutzmann's view^ is correct, children 
tend normally to speak late and to walk late, contrary to a 
current popular opinion. 

Dr W. Oltuszewski, of Warsaw, in his discussion of the 
mental and linguistic development of the child (462, p. 30), 
distinguishes three periods in the development of child-lan- 
guage : I. Primitive period — epoch of individual sounds and 
mute language, preceding the developmental period per se. 
This period is characterised by the reflex and pain phenomena 
of the primitive sounds, especially the vowels, dependent upon 
the innate capacity of the articulatory organs to function, and 
have nothing to do with the memory-centres of language, 
which develop considerably later ; also by pantomime, gesture 
and mimic movements, which at this period belong to the 
instinctive reflexes, and not, as later, to the imitation move- 
ments- — these are the child's original language, expressing 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 95 

his feelings, impressions, excitations, etc., long before the 
real language-centres have been formed. 2. Period of the 
development of the linguistic memory-centres. First to develop 
is the hearing-memory, then the motor (apprehension, repe- 
tition). 3. Period of association of ideas zvith words. (Inde- 
pendent language.) 

Egger recognises three periods in the development of the 
language of the child (181, p. 32): i. Instinctive, natural 
language. A stage of speech common to all times and all 
peoples, which is gradually restricted by the progress of the 
next linguistic stage. 2. Artificial language. Peculiar to each 
child, useful for communication with other children, and, 
especially with nurses and parents, a form of speech which 
never rises to the dignity of the language of a people, or even 
of a family. 3. Family, national language. This form of 
speech gradually supersedes the artificial language, just as the 
latter did the instinctive signs, and even more completely. 

Some investigators have gone into considerable detail and 
recorded many interesting facts missed by less patient inquirers. 
Thus Dr Allaire, whose conclusions are based upon daily ob- 
servations during several years of the development of his own 
children, distinguishes in the growth of the rudiments of 
infantile speech the following periods, the limits of which 
are not inevitably fixed, but may vary according to ' native 
weakness, suffering, disease and sickness, heredity, the con- 
formation of the diverse parts of the laryngeal apparatus and 
of the organs of hearing, and, besides, according to the presence 
of other children, who become real teachers ' (2, p. 485) : — 

I. Periods of Cries and Mute Movements of Suction. — About 
coeval with the first week of life. This period is characterised 
in storm and stress by the disordered cries and movements, 
which, as Ambroise Pare says, accompany the entrance of the 
child 'into the calamities of human life,' and in its calm by the 
rapprochement of the lips in mute suction, the result of un- 
conscious desire and an empty and hungry stomach. 

II. Period of the Formation of the Sound a and of the Birth 
of Musical Song. — Synchronous with the second week of life. 
During this period the physiognomy continues impassable, 
although, under the influences of environments, the sense 
organs are beginning to function ; the mxovements are still dis- 
ordered, but the cries have already become more varied and 
more expressive, as waking moments show j the suction move- 



96 THE CHILD 

ments are still mute, but the child already repeats and sings, a 
very gentle sound produced by the opening of the mouth and 
simple expiration, the sound a, which Scaliger called prima 
notissamaque iiifantis vox. 

III. Period of Transformation of Mute Suction Movements 
into Labial Noises. — Corresponds to the third and fourth weeks 
of life. During this period the physiognomy becomes ani- 
mated and the cries are modified in tone and timbre j ' the lip 
movements are no longer mute, the suctions changing to a 
labial noise (not spontaneous as Taine believes), which can be 
rendered by b^ m, or some intermediary sound ; sometimes the 
child, giving itself up to a sort of tasting, utters from time to 
time the nasal sound nj'a, nja ; the a is modulated more and 
more, and there arises a prattling, a sort of song formed by 
the breath, the expiration of this glottal sound is sometimes 
modified to ^, or nasalised to an.^ We have here ' the a of 
lacteal drunkenness, determined by the repletion of the 
stomach.' It is with reference to this period that we may say 
in the words of Persius, which Pare cites : Magister artis 
ingenique largitor Vefiter., negatas artifex sequi voces ('the 
stomach, i.e., hunger, is the master of art and the dispenser of 
genius, skilful to supply an eloquence which nature had denied.) 

IV. Period of the Formation of Labial, Guttural and Nasal 
Articulatio7ts. — Corresponding to the second month of life. 
During this period the features of the child are lighted up 
more and more under the influence of the more complete 
development of the organs of sense and new-born smiles and 
tears ; ' the cries no longer indicate merely sufferings and 
needs, but indicate rather clearly desires and wishes, and, 
moreover, serve to nourish the laryngeal muscles, for which 
inaction would be injurious ; the movements are abrupt, rapid, 
especially when the child manifests its will, or evinces a great 
satisfaction ; the lip movements can be heard as b, m, p, and 
combine soon with the glottal sound a, to form ba, ma, pa ; 
the soft labial b and the labio-nasal 7?i, which, at first, were 
only sketched, are no longer confused, and the strong labial/ 
(following always b) seems to indicate more especially repletion 
of the stomach.' At intervals nasals are emitted, but perhaps 
'the most important characteristic of this period is the forma- 
tion of guttural sounds, more or less sung, when the child, 
filled with milk, shows his happiness by vibrations of the 
throat and the tongue, i.e., by a succession of g?ia, ka, ra, and 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 97 

especially of the Arabian rha. The gutturals come after the 
labials and the labio-nasals. 

V. Period of the Formation of Dental Articulations. — Lasting 
from the end of the second to the end of the sixth month of 
life. During this period 'the child's features assume a real 
expression, the vagueness and indecision in the look disappears 
and the organs of sense function somewhat regularly; the 
movements (rather more co-ordinated) become true means of 
expression, like cries, laughter, tears, silence itself accom- 
panied or not by contractions of the frontal, the muscle of 
astonishment, surprise and admiration, and at the moment of 
waking the desire to play is easily read off.' The musical song 
becomes more frequent and 'the child utters ballads at the 
moon or the rising light, or gives voice to complaints which 
sometimes terminate in a languishing ma^ fia, ma.'' Towards 
the end of this period the repertory of the articulate voice is 
enriched by the soft dental d and the strong dental /, which 
at once combine with a to form da and ta — the emission of 
these sounds seeming to occur at the epoch of salivation pre- 
ceding the dental eruption, or during the teething. All these 
monosyllabic sounds — 'the primitive roots of human nature' 
de Brosse styled them — are repeated to satiety in the form 
of beads (if one can so express oneself), 7na^ ma., ma., ma ; pa, 
pa, pa, pa, etc. 

VI. Period of the Formation of the First Words. — Correspond- 
ing to the last six months of the first year of life. This period 
' is marked by the clear manifestation of intellectual life, which 
has begun with the gradual development of the senses ' ; the 
child hears and listens, looks and sees, his fingers exercise 
better their tactile functions, his movements are more rapid 
and expressive and become real gestures, his cries are more 
sung, especially when he feels the immoderate necessity of 
imitating the words he hears. In this period also ' the diverse 
parts of the laryngeal apparatus having acquired strength, 
vigour, and a certain habit of imitation, with the aid of the 
brain cells, the child begins to form true dissyllables ; the ma and 
pa for example, which had become afnama, apapa, mama77ia^ 
papapa, change to mama, maman, papa, etc., the articulate 
sounds gaining in strength and clearness what they lose in 
quantity, till, towards the end of the first year^ appear the first 
words (in the real acceptation of the term), mama, papa, in 
which thought and expression are associated.' 

G 



98 THE CHILD 

The alphabet of the child a year old, according to Dr 
Allaire, would contain the following letters, given in the order 
of their appearance : a (modified sometimes to ^, or nasalised 
to an) ; the labio-nasal m, the labials b, p, and the nasal n ; 
the gutturals, g^ k, r, rh (Arabian) ; the dentals, d^ t. It is 
only later in life that the child utters the vowels i, o, ii, the 
labials/ v, the lingual e, and the sibilant s. The evolution of 
the beginnings of infant speech is very slow, physical needs 
and stomachal contentment giving place gradually to self- 
imitation aud the influences of the personal milieu. Dr 
Allaire, however, mars a little, perhaps, his excellent paper, 
when, referring to the fact (cited by Dr E, B. Tylor) that 
certain Australian tribes have one word, mamman, for ' father ' 
and for 'big toe,' he asks whether the analogy cannot be 
understood by remembering that ' the child, as if he were still 
influenced by the attitudes of his foetal life, acquires very early 
the habit of playing with his feet or with his big toes, singing 
ma, ama.^ It is more than likely that to the Australian, as 
to other primitive peoples, the big toe is 'the father of the 
foot.' Further details on these topics will be found in the 
chapter on language. 

Even the mortality statistics of childhood and manhood 
furnish evidences of epochism and periodicity. 

General Periodicity. — Siegert, in his ' Periodicity in the 
Nature of the Child,' has discussed and sought to interpret the 
constant flux and reflux which seems to characterise childhood. 
Growth is rhythmic, bodily and mentally, in the large and in 
the small; day, night, week, month, season, year, have all 
their progressive and regressive phases, variations, which gradu- 
ally decrease in extent and frequency, occurring till the goal is 
reached and the permanent appears. Every form of growth 
and of activity knows these variations, and the good child is 
sometimes bad for a while ; the intelligent child stupid ; the 
neat and orderly, dirty and untidy; the strong, weak; the 
truthful, lying; the healthy and active, lazy and moody; the 
' numskull,' bright ; the mere memoriser, creative ; the imitator, 
capable of independent thinking; the great eater, fasting; the 
scholar, athletic ; the radical, conservative ; the optimist, pessi- 
mistic; the merry, sad; the high-spirited, depressed. The 
general conclusions at which the author arrives are as follows 

(596, p. 35) :— 

I. In every child the periodicity of development manifests 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 99 

itself in peculiar form. 2. The development of the whole 
body as well as of each individual organ takes place with the 
continual alternation of activity and rest (passivity). 3. To 
every intensive intellectual advance corresponds a retrogression 
in corporeal relation and vice versa. 4. The strong advance 
of one intellectual activity carries with it a corresponding de- 
pression of other intellectual activities. Especially does the 
mental development need the alternation of productive work 
and receptive work. 5. External and internal causes hasten 
or retard the periodical recurrence of action and reaction — the 
greater the advance in the moment of action the greater the 
relapse in the moment of reaction, 
/children ought, therefore, to be educated in accordance 
with this law of periodical recurrence, of action and reaction, 
of alternate corporeal and intellectual exercise, of productivity 
and receptivity, of stimulation and fatigue, of exaltation and 
depression, which dominates their entire development Edu- 
cation ought to respect two things, individuality and periodicity, 
and to know that every individuality is sui generis in its perio- 
dicity. The school must recognise the flux and the reflux, 
which are perfectly normal and natural in childhood, and seek 
to work harmoniously with the individual and the social, the in- 
ternal and the external factors which produce and control them. 
The first year of school life, the period between the third and 
fourth, and that between the sixth and seventh, are epochs in 
which both intellectual and corporeal regression seems to occur, 
and a regression greater than that which is to be normally ex- 
pected according to the traditions of periodicity. At these 
times intensive reaction is stamped upon the children (fatigue, 
dulness, carelessness of all sorts, slovenliness, etc.), of which 
not a little may be due to the overburdening occasioned by 
the school life. The schoolroom ought never to be without 
the motto cited from Landor : ' In every child there are many 
children ; but coming forth year after year, each somewhat 
like and somewhat varying.' 

Old Age — ^Second Childhood.^ — Most of the proverbs and 
folk-sayings in which childhood and old age are compared 
assert a resemblance in the weakness, silliness, helplessness, 
etc., of these two periods of human existence. The saying, 
' once a man and twice a child,' common in some form or 
other to most languages, expresses a widespread belief in the 
similarity of the latter end of man to his first beginning. The 
LofC. 



100 THE CHILD 

Zufii Indians, in their wonderful cosmogonic story, as recorded 
by Mr Cushing,^ have stated the parallel on a very physiological 
basis : — 

' Behold ! And we may now see why like new-born children 
are the very aged ; childish withal — d-ya-vwi [dangerously 
susceptible, tender, delicate] — not only toothless too, but also 
sure to die of diarrhoea if they eat ever so little save the soft 
parts and broths of cooked food. For are not the babes new- 
come from the Shi-u-na (hazy, steam-growing) world ; and are 
not the aged about to enter the Shi-po-lo-a (mist-enshrouded) 
world, where cooked food unconsumed is never needed by the 
fully dead ? ' The reason for this is detailed at great length in 
Zuni legends. 

The theory of the ' second childhood ' of man has also 
found a somewhat firm lodgment in science, in the shape of 
the doctrine of 'involution,' according to which there is in 
old age a general decay and weakening of the physiological 
functions. This causes the aged to resemble or to simulate 
in certain respects the child, whose evolution has not proceeded 
very far. Psychiatrists point out that the failure of age begins 
at the top, and we have the ' childishness ' of old men and 
women ; the psychologist notes the force of instinct in the old 
which brings them near to the child ; the biologists record the 
defects of movement and carriage in old age, which recall the 
beginnings of these human arts in childhood ; and the physi- 
ologist recognises in the old a return of the body and its parts 
in some particulars to the condition of the child. 

Age-cha7iges. — Some of the more noteworthy changes which 
the human body and its organs undergo vv^ith the process of 
age are contained in the following table, which is based upon 
the data in the paper of G. Delaunay (155) : — • 



Character. 


Change. 


Individuals generally 
Race .... 
Sex ... . 


differ most from one another at about 45 
years, the culmination of evolution 

anatomical and physiological differences 
much more marked in adult age 

as to nutrition, muscular strength, intelli- 
gence, etc., men differ most from women 
between 45-50 



^ Journ. Anier. Folk- Lore, V. p. 56. 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD 



01 



Character. 


Change. 


Constitution . 


constitutional differences are most marked 




among adults, where we meet with very 




strong, strong, medium, weak 


Bilateralism . 


the two sides of the body differ most in 




adults, much less in childhood and age 


General characters . 


increase in difference up to 45, and then 




gradually decrease after 50 


Quantity of blood . 


increases from infancy to adult age, then 




decreases 


Density of blood . 


?5 5 J ) J 


Quantity of haemoglobin 


?) 55 55 


Number of red corpuscles 


55 55 55 


Number of white cor- 




puscles 


diminishes from childhood to adult age, 




then increases 


Proportion of water in 




blood 


55 55 55 


Proportion of mineral m.at- 




ter in osseous system . 


increases up to 45 years, then decreases 


Organic matter 


decreases up to 45 years, then increases 


Proportion of carbonate 




of lime 


increases up to 45 years, then decreases 


Phosphate of lime . 


decreases up to 45 years, then increases 


Colour of hair 


darkens from childhood to adult age 


Form of hair . 


curly hair changes to straight 


Heart .... 


increases 


Lungs .... 


increase 


Brain .... 


increases 


Thymus .... 


decreases 


Thyroid gland 


decreases 


Kidneys 


decrease 


Suprarenal capsules 


decrease 


Foot .... 


changes from flat and long to short and 




arched 


Frequency of meals 


decreases from childhood to adult age, then 




increases 


Amount of food consum^ed 


increases to adult age, then decreases 


Pulse .... 


changes from frequent and feeble in child- 




hood to rarer and strong in adult, then 




in old age becomes frequent and weak 




again 


Respiration . 


less frequent from childhood to adult age, 




then more frequent 


Oxygen .... 


absorption increases from childhood to adult 




age, then decreases 


Carbonic acid 


excretion increases from childhood to adult 




age, then decreases 



I02 



THE CHILD 



Character. 


Change. 


Fecundity of woman 


diminishes after 25 years 


Weight of children . 


increases until mother has reached 40 years 


Movements . 


change from centripetal to centrifugal 


Writing . . . . 


first from right to left, then vice versa 


Voice .... 


changes from acuity to gravity up to 50 




years, and after 60 from gravity to acuity 


Intelligence . 


increase from brute to intelligence up to 50 




years, and after 60 descent towards im- 




becility 


Morals .... 


increase from vice to virtue up to 50 years, 




and after 60 descent towards vice 


Fear .... 


from fear to courage 


Appearance of organs and 




functions . , 


first the lower, then the higher 


Disappearance of organs 




and functions 


first the higher, then the lower 


Vegetative functions 


appear early, disappear late 


Animal functions 


appear later, disappear earlier 


Higher faculties of mind- 


appear between 25-30, and often diminish 




" after 50 


Lower faculties 


appear twice (childhood and old age), have 




two maxima 


Higher faculties 


appear once, have only one maximum in 




adult age 



M. Delaunay notes also that, being comparatively the 
highest, each faculty is dominant at the time of its appearance, 
yielding only to the appearance of some higher faculty that is 
dominant in like manner, and sometimes being completely 
annihilated by the latter. We can, perhaps, explain in this way 
the disappearance in the adult of certain things ie.g.^ gluttony, 
idleness, lust, etc.) which characterise childhood and adoles- 
cence on the one hand, and, on the other, the reappearance, 
with the disappearance of the higher faculties and the recru- 
descence of the lower, of the vices of the adolescent in the old 
man, who 'ends by "falling into childhood."' What is said 
of faculties seems also to apply to their products, hence 'the 
memory of a language learned at the age of four years, and 
afterwards forgotten, returns to the old man during the last 
years of his life.' 

But there is another side to the question of old age. It is 
not by any means altogether undoing, involution, devolution. 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD IO3 

The folk-praise of the wisdom of old age, the fashioning of 
the senator out of the senex, and of the oracle out of the 
aged woman, have not been completely baseless, and science 
may go more than one step in the direction of justifying the 
peoples of all times and of all races who selected from the 
ranks of the old men and women their historians and teachers, 
their leaders and advisers, their prophets, seers and priests. 
There is, in a sense, a golden age of old age ; and old age, 
like childhood, sometimes touches on divinity, an aspect of 
it which eclipses all the morbid and phylogenetically degenera- 
tive characteristics of this time of the life of the individual, 
not a few of which, senile dementia, e.g., are of complex 
origin, while the physical or somatic origin of other 
ailments and affections, generally attributed to old age 
per se, is very probable, as Dr Scott notes in his recent 
study of old age and death (583, p. 80). We are in 
need of just such an investigation of old age and its 
phenomena, as the ' child-study ' movement, an investigation 
that shall put old age in its true phylogenetic and ontogenetic 
setting, and emphasise its role in the individual and racial life 
of man. And it is possibly by no accident that the Chinese, 
one of the most child-like of all peoples, have utilised so 
well, and recognised so remarkably, the value and wisdom of 
the old. From them might have come the definition given 
by Brinton — ' The sage is he whose life is a consistent whole, 
and who carries out in his age the plans which he laid in 
youth' (78, p. 75). 

Just as in childhood naive wisdom proves that the brain and 
its associate organs are not altogether functionless, even in the 
highest sense, so, in old age, the clear judgment and perfect 
control of the higher mental faculties, which so often charac- 
terise the aged, centenarians even, justify the statement that 
the cerebral organ is the last to decay, except under patho- 
logical or abnormal conditions. This is confirmed by Hum- 
phrey's study of 900 cases on record of extreme old age 
(310, p. 24, p. 28), and, as Dr Scott remarks, 'in green old 
age {age de retour) there can hardly be any doubt that the 
intellectual qualities are even relatively improved ' (538, p. 79). 
The connection of longevity with the intellectual and cognate 
professions acts almost like a natural selection, and secures to 
the race an elected and reasoned service on the part of the 
sane and healthy aged that can only be compared with the 





w 



■■^> 



'Green Old Age' among tiie Ainu oe 
(From Rep. U.S. Nat. Mus., 1S90.) 



Japan, 



THE PERIODS OF CHILDHOOD IO5 

instinctive devotion of early maturity, or the enthusiasm of 
childhood. In old age, the individual as such, in his onto- 
genetic right, can serve the race with real distinction, for, to 
use the words of Dr Scott, ' old age is really the test of life 
from an individual standpoint,' and ' it is the race life that is 
normally the source of our greatest force and happiness, and 
old age is only successful when it has so absorbed this life that 
its more intellectual service becomes its deepest motive and 
highest happiness ' (538, p. 85). 

Sometime, with the increase of health, peace, and other 
conditions which favour longevity, and the prevalence, to a 
much greater extent than the hurry, bustle and youthful 
ambition of the day permit as yet, of ' green old age,' this 
true ' second childhood ' of the individual may become con- 
sciously beneficial intellectually to the race, as has been the 
first childhood unconsciously. 






W 



'^Ib 



i:ri 

I' 



^^ 



u 2 




<r^ 



CHAPTERV 

THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD 

Sign Language. — Degerando's treatise on the education of 
deaf-mutes (153), although published in 1847, contains many 
very valuable and interesting thoughts concerning the origin 
and development of human speech, not alone with respect to 
those unfortunate beings who, up to the sixteenth century, 
were hardly deemed susceptible of any education at all, whose 
attempted instruction was more than once placed under the 
(^ban of theology, and whom the Roman Law, up to the time 
of Justinian, saw fit to ignore, but concerning the language ac- 
quisition of normal children as well. According to Degerando, 
'the mother tongue is learned from the cradle, without art, 
by the sole effect of the circumstances in which the child 
finds himself situated ; he does not know how he learned it ; 
the spectators have not remarked it, and the philosophers 
have not inquired about it ' (153, I. p. 12) ; indeed, it furnishes 
a notable example of the fact that ' we are generally not 
astonished at the really marvellous-in-itself, but at that which 
is beyond the circle of our habits.' The author emphasises 
the importance of the mother as the first nurse, and the first 
teacher of the child, and notes how ' the mother really, and 
the nurse as well, plays the role of teacher, almost without 
knowing it, at least without method, design or art' (153, 1, p. 33). 
Custom is the great shaper of the child in matters of language, 
and he has a kind of instinct to receive, ' profiting by what 
is said for him, and by what is said in his presence.' In 
spoken language the little child learns rather by sight than by 
hearing, and his vocabulary grows by the constant association 
of some word of mouth with the language of his feelings, 
expression of the eyes, features of the face, sound of the 
voice, caresses, cares, etc. Degerando notes that 'the child 
of the rich understands more words and less actions, the 

107 



I08 THE CFIILD 

child of the poor less words and more actions,' this being the 
reflex of the environment. Of imitation he remarks : ' The 
faculty of imitation, accompanied by an instinctive need, a 
secret pleasure, is a faculty that seems to predominate above 
all in infancy, as it does, in general, at the first period of 
intellectual development' (153, I. p- 42). The presence of 
children of about its own age leads the child to set up 
a regular commerce of words, while with the se a little 
younger than himself he becomes a play-teacher of language j 
often their discourse is singularly elliptical, they do not express 
themselves by general ideas, but by vague, confused, incom- 
plete images, and they are especially apt to be deceived by 
figurative expressions, which they take in all their literalness. 

When it comes to instruction, ' children are still rather the 
pupils of circumstances,' and with reading they enter a new 
world. In writing—' picturing language ' — the child ' speaks 
quite low, as if he spoke to someone'; when he reads, he 
' repeats quite low the corresponding words, as if he were 
listening to someone — the words of the articulate language, 
both in writing and in reading, being retraced, at least in imagina- 
tion' (153, I. p. 59). 

It was formerly believed that deaf-mutes needed \tQ_be. 
'given a soul,' but, as Degerando points out (153, II. p. 70), ' the 
deaf-mute takes refuge in the inexhaustible fecundity of human 
ideas, and creates a language of his own — rich, expressive, 
eloquent even, eminently picturest^ue — the language of action, 
pantomime,' in which analogy and the social factor play their 
appropriate parts. The deaf-mute has ideas for which he has 
no words, but no expressions devoid of sense. The sign- 
language of deaf-mutes has its reduction signs corresponding 
to the action-language of primitive man, and these ' find their 
etymology in the primitive picture of which it is the abbrevia- 
tion. Deaf-mute language can be original, mobile, individual, 
created at every moment by circumstances, and possessed of 
purely arbitrary and conventional signs ; ' but Degerando 
exaggerates, perhaps, when he declares that ' this naive original 
language paints with perfect truth the first operations of human 
intelligence' (153, II. p. 97). There does seem to be a differ- 
ence, occasionally, at least, between the deaf-mute child's signs 
(and the normal child's) to his parents, brothers and sisters, 
other children, etc., and those of deaf-mutes taught together, 
and individuality of temperament and nature, here, as else- 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD 109 

where, is an important factor, as Degerando illustrates from 
Arnemann's 'Observations on Deaf-Mutes,' published at Berlin 
in 1799, the only work of the time in which the sign-language 
of the deaf-mutes is recorded, and by numerous sign-lists of 
his own observation. The signs by which Arnemann was 
known to five pupils, who successively entered the institution, 
were as follows : (i) indication of a plaster on the neck (which 
he had when he came first) ; (2) taking off the hat ; (3) tallness; 
(4) supporting left hand on hip (a mannerism) ; (5) drawing 
index finger down nose (he had a straight nose). Noting the 
'greater perspicacity of the organs of sense with savages,' 
Degerando remarks that ' vivacity of sensations in itself con- 
tributes really little to knowledge ' ; but languages of all sorts, 
natural and artificial, multiply indefinitely our ideas, for 'he 
who sees that he has comprehended his fellow, and knows that 
he has been understood by him, in his turn will create an art 
to make himself forever better understood' (153, IL 167). 
In this man differs very much from the lower animals, it being 
true, in a sense, that 'man understands the animal, but the 
animal does not understand man.' The various stages in the 
language of action, which is closely related to drawing — is 
really drawing — are thus outlined by Degerando: i. No art ; 
2. art; 3. auxiliary art (used by actors, orators, etc.); 4. con- 
vention. Very interesting is the statement of Eschke, made 
in 1799, that 'deaf-mutes learn most easily Russian, Pohsh 
and English ; the hardest languages being Spanish, Portuguese, 
French, and especially German.' 

Gesture and Expression in Dramatic Art. — In connection 
with the racial and individual peculiarities in the language of 
action, suggested by Degerando's observation, Mantegazza's 
study of the ' Scientific Canons of Dramatic Art ' is of value. 
By gesture Mantegazza understands 'those muscular move- 
ments which are not absolutely necessary to complete a psychic 
work or function, but accompany it by sympathy of influence.' 
We do not teach infants to laugh, to cry, or even to gesture 
(angrily or pleasantly), and still less than all children do all 
races weep, laugh and gesture exactly alike. In all they are 
and all they do (and the actor who seeks to reproduce them 
must be ' an artist rather than a mere photographer ') members 
of each human race have something strikingly characteristic. 
The Italian is aesthetically serene ; the Frenchman ready to 
leap ; the German filled with the thought that is whirling in 



no THE CHILD 

his brain ; the Enghshman's characteristics are contempt and 
energy ; the Spaniard's, cahii and voluptuous arrogance. The 
Itahan is an artist in speech and movement ; the Frenchman 
a vivacious pleasure-seeker j the German a slow-moving philo- 
sopher j the Englishman-, a German without bo?ihomie ; the 
Spaniard an Italian orientalised. These are the peculiarities 
which limit the actor (and all children are very early in life 
actors) in the search for the 'true beautiful,' the expression of 
which is beyond that of the true. Not even stopped ears and 
a silent tongue can utterly suppress these age-old race tempera- 
ments and race characteristics which play their role in the 
evolution and variation of sign-speech. 

Gestures of Primitive Peoples. — Darwin, in his study of the 
expression of the emotions in man and animals, after noting 
the fact that many of the physical indications and expressions 
of laughter, fear, suffering, rage, anger, love and pleasure do 
not characterise man exclusively, but were pre-human, being 
found in various lower animals of widely different races, came 
to the conclusion that 'the same state of mind is expressed 
throughout the world with remarkable uniformity, and this fact 
is in itself interesting as evidence of the close similarity of 
bodily structure and mental disposition of all the races of 
mankind.' Nevertheless, there is diversity in this unity. Dr 
Max Bartels (after Vaughan Stevens) has investigated the 
emotional gestures of the Orang Hutan, a very primitive people 
of Malacca, with reference to the syllabus employed by Darwin 
in his researches, with the result of developing the existence of 
not a few differences between the two tribes of the Belenda 
and the Meneek (to say nothing of the other adjacent peoples) 
in the most elementary gestures. While, e.g., the Belenda 
express astonishment by opening wide the mouth and eyes 
and lifting the eyebrows, wrinkle the skin about the eyes 
when making a careful examination or trying to understand a 
difficult thing, shrug the shoulders to express inability to carry 
out something, the Meneek seemingly do not employ these 
gestures. Moreover, differences exist among the women and 
children also, and several of the modes of expression in Dar- 
win's list appear to be unknown to both tribes, e.g., the balling 
of the fists in anger, laughter to tears, a 'guilty look.' In 
great fear the children of the Belenda act almost as Europeans. 
The children of the Meneek, however, are very quiet ; the 
Belenda men run away silently, the women scream as they 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD III 

dash off, while the Meneek men sit down quietly. We learn, 
too, the curious fact that, 'in the presence of strange Euro- 
peans, the Orang Hutan banish every expression out of their 
face, and take on the appearance of almost idiotic stupidity, in 
order thus to conceal their real thoughts' (39, p. 270). 

Sign-Language of Primitive Peoples^ Children^ etc. — As 
Degerando points out (153, II. p. 193), Dr Samuel Akerly, 
in a paper, ' Observations on the Language of Signs,' read 
before the New York Lyceum of Natural History, January 23, 
1823, was about the first to study comparatively the sign- 
language of deaf-mutes and the sign-language of a primitive 
people — certain Indians of North America. Besides noting 
the remarkable closeness in the rendering of the ideas, driiik^ 
sleep, eat, truth, lie, good, pretty, by deaf-mutes and by Indians, 
Dr Akerly observes that ' the art of analysis is carried further 
with savages ' — whereas reduction seemed to be the one art of 
deaf-mute sign-language. 

The most notewonhy contribution to this topic, however, 
is Colonel Garrick Mallery's exhaustive essay on 'Sign-Lan- 
guage among North American Indians, compared with that 
among other Peoples and Deaf-Mutes' (393), published in 
1 88 1 by the Bureau of Ethnology at Washington. The sub- 
ject of gesture is treated in all its aspects, among animals, in 
young children, in persons afflicted with mental disorders, 
among uninstructed deaf-mutes and deaf-mutes who have been 
taught, among low tribes of man, with the ignorant classes of 
civilised races, with the blind, with those of a stammering 
tongue, and with orators, but chiefly as evidenced among the 
various tribes of North American aborigines. It is absence of 
sufficient brain power, the author seems to believe, that keeps 
certain of the lower animals from true speech, otherwise the 
dog would turn into words many of his apt gestures, and the 
wonderful imitation of the parrot would turn to significance. 
In the course of his long companionship with man, the dog 
has invented not a few signs which man has come to under- 
stand, and not a few other animals may be said to illustrate the 
fact that the brute creation understands man's gesture better 
than his normal, unexcited, low speech. 

With young children a small number of words is often 
(but not always) associated with a very large number of 
gestures and facial expressions. The child's gestures may be 
said to become intelligent long in advance of his speech, and 



112 THE CHILD 

undoubtedly he invents signs as well as words. In certain 
forms of mental disorder, the simpler, older language of signs 
seems to be intelligible, or to survive after spoken or written 
speech has ceased to be understood. Thus the insane will 
often obey gestures when words are of no avail, the aphasic 
subject will hardly let go his ejaculations and his gestures. 
Congenital deaf-mutes, Colonel Mallery thinks, will first make 
signs of the same sort as normal children of the same age, and 
he accredits to the blind (Laura Bridgeman and Cardinal 
Wiseman's blind Italian) an innate power of development of 
gesture (facial and otherwise) w^hich their affliction fails to 
suppress. 

The low tribes of men are not to be exactly paralleled 
with the ignorant and lower classes of civilised races and 
communities, for with the former sign-language is not such a 
necessity always, since quite often, even w^ith very primitive 
peoples (the study of the North American Indian, e.g., shows 
that the existence of a copious language of signs does not 
necessarily mean a meagre vocabulary), the development of 
oral language is very great. It is to the ignorant more than 
to the primitive part of mankind that Volumnia's advice to 
Coriolanus applies — ' Action is eloquence, and the eyes of 
the ignorant more learned than the ears,' a statement which 
Colonel Mallery paraphrases thus — ' The hands of the ignorant 
are more eloquent than their tongues.' Even among the 
educated and the intelligent the stammerer, through necessity, 
and the man of eloquence, through excess energy, are frequent 
users of gesture. Gesture-speech was once of great extent 
and profound importance in all parts of the world, for, as 
Colonel Mallery remarks (393, p. 284) : ' With voice man 
imitated a few sounds of nature, with gesture actions, posi- 
tions, forms, dimensions, directions, distances and their deri- 
vations.' In fact, 'oral speech remained rudimentary long 
after gesture had become an art.' Both in the childhood of 
the race and in the childhood of the individual the study of 
sign-language is an important aid to comparative philology, 
the action-etymology of the Latin imbecillus being no less 
intelligible to a Cheyenne Indian than to an ancient Roman. 
While Colonel Mallery gives many interesting examples of the 
frequent interchange of conversation and story by deaf-mutes 
and Indians with their systems of gesture-speech, he by no 
means holds these to be identical, but rather different dialects 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD il3 

of the gesture-language of mankind. Tylor's statement that 
'gesture-language is substantially the same all over the world' 
must, he says, be modified to signify generic uniformity with 
specific varieties, for gesture-speech, like any other human 
art, does not always employ the same signs for the same ideas, 
but rejoices often in a manifold variety of expression. 

Miss Paola Lombroso calls attention to the fact that, 
while their elders take all sorts of pains to teach the young 
child words, little or no effort is made to help or to instruct it 
in the use of gesture-language, which for the young human 
being, as for primitive man, is, at first, the nature mode of 
expressing needs and feelings (369, p. 4). The author con- 
siders that ' the gesture of negation springs from the natural 
way the child has of removing his head laterally from the 
breast when he no longer desires milk, that of assent being 
derived from the infant's action in moving his head up and 
down when he seeks the nipple.' The gesture of protruding 
the lips, so as to claim attention, is attributed to the ' instinc- 
tive movement of protruding the lips in order to eat' She 
adopts Preyer's explanation of the joining of the hands when 
requesting anything, ' because in the act of prehension the 
hands are extended, and, in order to take the object desired, 
surround it, and are united.' The child uses gesture first to 
express his thoughts and feelings, because it is at the same 
time the quickest and the least fatiguing method, and, ' when 
later he abandons gesture for speech, it is as a matter of 
economy (through the law of least effort), because the words 
we have continually used in his presence and hearing have 
become familiar to him, and he is now able, by their means, 
to express with greater ease and precision a large number of 
facts and sensations' (369, p. 170). Much later in life many 
individuals for the same reason adopt written language as the 
means of expressing themselves best and most satisfactorily. 
Some few others, more highly favoured, find in poetry alone 
the needed channel in which their thought can most freely 
and securely flow ; and, again, genius has often selected some 
special form of poetry whereby to picture forth its thoughts 
and its dreams. 

Ojiomatopoeia and the Origin of Language. — The speech of 
little children has always been a source of wonderment to 
man, and Psammetichus, King of Egypt (d. 610 B.C.), was not 
the only investigator who turned to childhood for the solution 

H 



114 THE CHILD 

of the problem of language origins. Psammetichus, so Hero- 
dotus tells us, came to the conclusion that the oldest language 
on the face of the earth was the Phrygian, because two chil- 
dren, isolated by his orders, spoke first the word bekos^ which 
in that tongue signified ' bread.' Farrar, who accepts the 
story, says that bekos (minus the Greek -os) is merely a child's 
onomatopoeic rendering of the bleating of a goat, which, 
indeed, is possible, since the children were under the care 
of a shepherd. We may here, Farrar thinks, find the record 
of two very interesting facts, viz., ' that the children first 
named animals, and that the name given was onomatopoeic 
or imitative of the sounds uttered by the creature named.' 
Long after the Egyptian's experiment we have mention of 
similar, but somewhat discredited, investigations by Frederick 
11. (i 194-1250) of Germany and James IV." (1473-1513) of 
Scotland. Whatever their authenticity may be these stories 
are of historical interest, as evidencing at least a suspicion 
that the origin and growth of child-speech stood in some re- 
lation to the development of human language (194, p. 12). 
A very good sketch of the onomatopoeic theory of the origin 
of language, as set forth by various ancient and modern writers, 
will be found in Regnaud (530), while the evidence in its 
support is exhaustively treated by Canon Farrar in his 
Chapters on Language (194), in connection with which ought 
to be read Trumbull's brief discussion of some of these data 
(649), and Wedgewood's in the introduction to his Dictionary 
of English Etymology (678). Of special value are the thorough- 
going articles by Dr J. Owen Dorsey on ' Siouan Onomatopes ' 
(173), H. T. Peck on 'Onomatopoeia in Some West African 
Languages' (482), and Mr W. G. Aston on 'Japanese Onoma- 
topes and the Origin of Language ' (16). That onomatopoeia 
has played a considerable part in the evolution of the earliest 
human forms of speech, as it now does in the language of 
early childhood, is doubtless true, but its importance has not 
always been of the first order. 

Japanese Onomatopes. — Mr W. G. Aston, following up a 
suggestion of Dr E. B. Tylor as to the need for 'a classified 
collection of words with any strong claim to be self-expressive,' 
has, in his paper on ' Japanese Onomatopes and the Origin of 
Language,' studied in detail the onomatopoeic element in the 
Japanese tongue. The conclusions at which he arrives are as 
follows (16, p. 352) : — 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD II5 

1. The first speech of mankind consisted of natural cries — 
shouts, grunts and hisses. These were developed into inter- 
jections (Oh ! No ! Hush !) by a tv/o-fold process. The ideas 
become more distinct and definite, and the sounds, at first 
differentiated only by tone, became articulate. 

2. From such interjections there have been derived a very 
considerable proportion of the grammatical forms and particles 
of the Japanese language, such as case signs, honorific and 
interrogative particles, the signs of the indicative (?), optative 
conditional and imperative moods, and of the causative (?) 
and negative verbs. A good many words of the general 
vocabulary may be traced to the same origin. 

3. A further stage in the development of language consists 
in the imitation of such non- significant vocal sounds and 
motions as blowing, spitting, gulping and coughing. 

4. It is here that mankind found a model for the mute 
consonants. 

5. It was also at this stage that the imitations of motions 
by motions of the organs of speech began. 

6. In onomatopoeia mute consonants are usually expres- 
sive of motion, vowels and nasals of sound, the aspirates 
occupying an intermediate position. 

7. Ordinary onomatopes, such as rat-tat, bow^-wow, etc., 
are of late origin, and can throw little light on the genesis 
of speech. 

8. Letter correspondence in like onomatopes of the same 
or different languages follows the classification into mutes, 
aspirates and nasals. It is only where there is some special 
reason that the variations occur between sounds made by 
the same organ of speech as in ordinary philology. 

It is quite evident that the onomatopoeic words of many 
savage peoples are of too artificial and intellectual a sort to be 
compared with the few instinctive imitations of uninfluenced 
childhood. 

Australian Onomatopoeia. — That there is a great variety in 
the onomatopoeic or imitative words of the lowest races of man 
— a much greater variety than can be said to exist in the early 
speech of the human child — is evident from a careful study of 
their language. In the different Australian dialects, e.g.., we 
find the following words (among others) for ' laugh ' : waler, 
krambalwert, kangalla, gooryman, kinka, tirrikeblin, munka, yie, 
munjur, kindi pillia, karibok, ginthinthintha, wathiman, yathin, 



ii6 



THE CHILD 



etc. ; and among American Indian tribes the following names 
for the ' butterfly ' : tletlu, lolenu, kolilu, walwilekash, kepkap, 
wekwak, etc. ; and in Australia : billybyleukka, coolumbria, 
booroo booroo, balumbir, etc. So, also, there is immense 
variety in |he words for ' yes ' and ' no ' among the Australian 
and other primitive languages, complexity being often found 
where least expected, and simplicity where it might not be 
looked for. 

It is fair, however, to say that, with respect to human 
noises and movements especially, the Australians (and some 
other primitive races as well, like the Fanti) evidence great 
skill in onomatopoeic imitation. The Dieyerie language of 
South Australia, e.g., has many very expressive words of this 
sort (136, II. p. 89), such, e.g., as the following: — 

Dumb. 

Itching. 

Trotting pace. 

Mimicking for the purpose of joking. 

A ball, played with by children. 

Round. 

Laugh. 

Yes. 

Very crooked. 

Rustling or whirring noise caused by birds rising. 

A grunting noise. 

Ejaculation to warn from danger. 

Slowly, gently. (Kulie = ennigh ?). 

Shaking. 

Blaze, flame. 

Directly. 

Feeling with the hands, groping in dark. Kurra= 

feeling. 
Circle, current in a stream. 
Disabled, deformed. 
Talkative, gambling. 
Mirage. 

Continually repeating, reiterating. 
Be quick, hasten. 
Hard, tough, strong. 
Groping in any enclosed space with the hands 

for anything. 
Noise caused by birds settling on land or water. 
Ticklish. 
To put the tongue out of the mouth to denote 

that the person who does so is only jesting. 
Walking softly on tip-toe to surprise. 
Walking stealthily so as not to disturb prey. 
Itch. 



Apooapoo 

Boonoonoo 

Bunyabunyina 

Chandachanduna 

Chuboochuboo 

Doomoodomoora 

Kinka 

Kookoo 

Koodakoodarie 

Koongarra 

Koonkana 

Kubbou 

Kulkulie 

Kunthakunthuna 

Kurumba 

Kurrurrie 

Kurrakurrana 

Moonyirrie 

Mooromooroo 

Munumuruna 

Nillanilla 

Nokooloonokoloo 

Nooroonooroo 

Oorooooroo 

Pirrakuna 

Piyacooduna 

Thitti 

Thuliekirra 

Thumpuna 

Thumpathumpuna 

Wittcha 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD II7 

Wittwittuna = Roaring of thunder, 

Yelyelkaroo = Hysterics (with women). 

Yikyillarie = Hysterics after excessive laughter. 

Variety in Onomatopoeia. — Such words partake, too, in 
distinct or indistinct fashion of the genius of the language 
to which they belong ; and in such languages at least as those 
treated of by Dr Dorsey serve more as formative elements of 
the vocabulary than do, generally, the onomatopoeias of chil- 
dren ; the latter have, in fact, a species of deadness about 
them or a servile kind of imitation that the speech of primitive 
peoples often does not possess at all. There is usually more 
life and body to the onomatopes of savages than to those of 
civilised children; only in their 'original languages,' those 
they create for themselves, do we meet with the real corre- 
spondences of savage onomatopes. Children alone, who were 
capable of creating words like bojnvassis, ' the feeling you have 
just before you jump, don't you know — when you mean to 
jump and want to do it, and are just a little bit afraid to do 
it' (296, p. 108), could compete with the originators of many 
of the onomatopes of primitive tongues. The child is re- 
pressed by the necessity of taking on the language of his 
elders before he has either the opportunity or the requirement 
to create onomatopes like the following, cited by Dr Dorsey, 
from various dialects of the Siouan stock of American Indian 
languages: Khd-dha^=^t\\Q sound made in brushing against 
or pulling through sunflowers, grass or leaves'; *S+='the 
sound of ice breaking up and floating off, or that of a steady 
rain'; gatd-khi^^ t\\Q sound heard when a tree is struck with 
an axe in cold weather ' ; dhi-khdha^^^ zhe=^^ the crunching sound 
heard when a sled is pulled over firm snow on a frosty 
morning.' 

In the simpler sort of onomatopes : Hu., ' to bark like a dog 
or a wolf ' ; shi., ' the sound of planing ' ; X-u-, ' the noise of a 
gun,' etc., the Siouan Indian is much nearer the child. With 
the adult civilised individual the cultivated imagination comes 
to the rescue — three young men, e.g., asked to state what sound 
was suggested to them by the letter group g/al?, answered, 
respectively, 'Dropping of something semi-liquid,' 'croaking 
of a frog,' 'clapping of hands together' (109, p. 117) — though 
not a little of the old onomatopoeic art lits dormant even here. 
With adults of the present day, however, the exercise of 
onomatopoeia is interpretative rather than creative. Sir Daniel 



Il8 THE CHILD 

Wilson records the following interesting observations of Ameri- 
can Indians as to certain onomatopceias : ^ ' Oronyhateka, an 
educated Mohawk Indian, in replying to some queries ad- 
dressed to him relative to his native language, thus writes me 
in reference to the Caprimulgus vociferus or whip-poor-will : 
" When I listen with my Indian ears, it seems to me utterly 
impossible to form any other word from an imitation of its 
notes than kwa-kor-yeuh, but when I put on my English ears 
I hear the bird quite distinctly saying whip-poor-wilL^'' 
Assickanack, an educated Odahwah Indian, wrote the same 
cry,, heard nightly throughout the summer in the American 
forests, wah-oo-nah ; and an Englishman, recently arrived in 
Canada, who listened to the cry for the first time, without 
being aware of the popular significance attached to it, wrote it 
down, at my request, eh-poo-weh.'' The present writer, when 
among the Kootenays of South-Eastern British Columbia in 
the summer of 1891, found that, when he tried to think in the 
Indian language, the cry of the owl seemed to be k'setlkinetl 
pdtlke, as the Kootenays render, but on relapsing into English 
it was unmistakably the familiar tu-whit-tu-zvhit-tu-whii. The 
whippoorwill was certainly not the first thing named by the 
American Indians, or the frog by the Pacific Islanders ; and 
the fact that their language had already taken some sort of 
shape before these onomatoepic names were invented, more 
than any actual difference in the cries of the creatures them- 
selves, must account for the different words used to name the 
whippoorwill, which Dr Gatschet has noted among various 
Indian tribes, and for the different onomatopoeic names recorded 
by Dr Guppy as existing among the Solomon Islanders, Aus- 
tralians, Malays, etc. 

Developme7it of Language from the Cry. — According to 
V. Henri (293, p. 27), there exists, from the point of view of 
anatomy and physiology, 'only a quantitative difference 
between the language of animals and the speech of man, the 
latter possessing a much more extensive register and an 
infinitely more varied tiuibre and articulation.' The problem 
of the origin of language may thus be not a linguistic one, but 
' a chapter of comparative anatomy (articulation) and of pure 
physiology (rudimentary exercise of faculty).' 

Lefevre (352, p. 42) thus sketches the development of 
human speech from the cry to the grammatical categories : 
1 Preh. Man., 3rd Ed., Vol. H. p. 365. 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD II9 

' Animals possess two of the important elements of language — 
the spontaneous reflex cry of emotion or need, the voluntary 
cry of warning, threat or summons. From these two sorts of 
utterance, man, endowed already with a richer vocal apparatus 
and a more developed brain, evolved numerous varieties by 
means of stress, reduplication, intonation. The warning or 
summoning cry, the germ of the demonstrative roots, is the 
parent of the names of numbers, sex and distance; the 
emotional cry, of which our simple interjections are but the 
reHcs, in combination with the demonstratives, prepares the 
outlines of the sentence, and already represents the verb and 
the names of states or actions. Imitation, direct or symbolical, 
and necessarily only approximative of the sounds of external 
nature, i.e.^ onomatopoeia, furnished the elements of the 
attributive roots, from which arise the names of objects, 
special verbs and their derivatives. Analogy and metaphor 
complete the vocabulary, applying to the objects discerned by 
touch, sight, smell and taste qualifying adjectives derived from 
onomatopoeia. Reason then coming into play rejects the 
greater part of this unmanageable wealth, and adopts a certain 
number of sounds which have already been reduced to a vague 
and generic sense ; and by derivation, composition and affixes, 
the root sounds produce those endless families of words, related 
to each other in every degree of kindred, from the closest to 
the most doubtful, which grammar finally ranges in the cate- 
gories known as the parts of speech.' 

But one can dogma.tise only with danger here. Sex has 
been thought responsible for some of the shaping and beauti- 
fying of language among men, as it certainly has among the 
animals. Love made the first poet when every word was a 
poem, and all speech, perhaps, chaotically musical. It is a 
long step from the mutual calls of animals to the languages 
which whole peoples now use in international correspondence. 

The influence of the sex-instinct in the formation or 
shaping of language is well seen at about the time of 
puberty, when the 'nonsense-talk ' of lovers is so apt to be 
indulged in, and when even entirely new languages are some- 
times invented and used for a considerable period. In other 
respects the relation of child and mother has probably always 
been the chief factor in the production of language, and 
women and children are still, in the 7ia'ive way, the typical 
users of language. 



120 THE CHILD 

Regnaud (530), too, takes the cry as the point of departure 
for the history of the human mind as written in language. In 
the beginning, apparently, an ensemble of favourable circum- 
stances caused the cry (now understood by consciousness) to 
pass from the instinctive to the rational state, and to become 
significant. One can hardly maintain, as some have done, 
that the cry was the creator of consciousness. 

According to Zanardelli the language-unit is the interjec- 
tion, which never really becomes a word, and never can be 
etymologised into a root and its prefix or suffix. From this 
point of view the great problem of early man was how to 
pass from interjection and imitative cries to ' roots.' The 
mechanism of an interjection, which is, so to speak, 'the 
heart of language,' lies more in the intonation than in the 
sound itself; ah! for example, may signify 'pain, pleasure, 
surprise, fear, admiration, reproof,' etc. The intonation which 
gave life to the original interjections still survives to give^ 
different meanings to real words (693). The psychology of 
the interjection has. yet to be written. 

Language used to Domestic Animals. — Some interesting 
facts in connection with the history of the cry may be gleaned 
from the study of the 'language used to domestic animals,' 
an exhaustive account of which has recently .been published 
by Dr H. Carrington Bolton of New York. 'The terms 
used in calling them,' says Dr Bolton (65, p. 113), 'are 
generally corruptions of the ancient names of the animals 
themselves (sometimes with a prefix, as "come"), and the rest 
of the language is made up of obsolete expressions originally 
forming part of ordinary speech in the infancy of its develop- 
ment, which have been preserved through this special usage, 
together with inarticulate sounds and calls having their origin 
in the attempt of man to lower his language to the com- 
prehension of the domesticated animals, and to imitate their 
own cries. All these words are subject to the same influences 
that lead to the development of dialects, thus producing 
transformations not easily traced ; moreover, these changes 
are quite radical, inasmuch as the language is unwritten, and 
is perpetuated only by the lore ofthe/olk.' 

A very important feature of the language under con- 
sideration is 'the musical intonation, which gives to each 
cry a special character, having great influence with the animals 
addressed.' In calling, e.g., an animal from a distance, ' the 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD 



121 



cry becomes a loud shout in a shrill key, and greatly 
prolonged,' while, if the animal is close by, 'the same term 
is uttered in a soft, low tone, and coaxingly.' This intonation 
is almost an art by itself, and one may compare it with the 
' calls ' of children on the street, the ' cries ' of hawkers and 
pedlars, and other more primitive forms of speech, where the 
same device is largely employed. 

The Spanish proverb, ' It is useless to call tus-tus to an 
old dog,' exemplifies another aspect of this somewhat ancient 
language, for old animals and young animals have very 
frequently entirely different call-words. In Lettish, e.g.^ dogs 
are called with kuts I kuts I and puppies with tschu ! tschu ! 
In lUyria dogs are driven away with os I or cuke ! puppies 
with sibe ! and Lithuanian shepherds call sheep with ait^ ait I 
lambs with burr ! burr I 

It is worthy of note also that some children's names for 
domesticated animals are closely related to the corresponding 
call-words, e.g., the word hilz-paert, used by children in 
Oldenburg, consists of /(2(?r/ ('horse ') and kuz, the call-word 
for that animal. This appears clearly also in the following list 
of children's nicknames and call-words for animals in the Saxon 
Erzgebirge, which Dr Bolton cites from Goepfert (65, p. 68) : — 



Animal. 


Children's Nickname. 


Call-Word. 


Cow 


■ mutschl 


mutschl, mutsch 


Goat . 
Pig 


hapl 
boschl 


hapl, hap, hap 
boschl, bosch, bosch 


Cat 


mizl 


niiz, hiz, hiz 


Goose 


liwl 


hwl, lib, lib 


Chicken 
Hen * 


zipl 
buti 


zipl, zip, zip 
butl, but, but 



Dr Bolton (65, p. 66) calls attention to the fact that the 
dog has been highly favoured by man, who ' pays an uncon- 
scious tribute to the intehigence of his faithful companion by 
addressing him with words of ordinary speech,' while for the 
other domestic animals (horses, cattle, sheep, swine, poultry, 
etc.) he employs 'a variety of singular terms never used in 
speaking to his fellows ; these comprise inarticulate sounds 
and musical calls, besides whisthng, chirping, clicking, and 



122 THE CHILD 

Other sounds not easily represented by any combination of 
letters of the English alphabet, nor by musical notation.' No 
careful observations have yet been made of the conduct of 
children in this matter. To other animals than the dog, just 
as to his own infant, man seems to prefer to use a sort of 
speech which, as Dr Bolton remarks, is ' baby-talk ' of an 
outre type. It is, however, a curious fact that, for the 
benefit of man's first pet, his human child, one sort of ' baby- 
talk ' was devised, and for his second, the domesticated pet 
animal, another. 

Another fact, paralleled also in the beginnings of speech 
in the human individual, is brought out by this author, v/ho 
observes : 'Since the same sound is used in Germany to stop 
horses as is used in Italy to start them, viz., brrrr^ it is con- 
ceivable that an Italian horse transported to Germany might 
bolt in response to the Teutonic command to stop. Several 
reversals of this character have been reported to me ; the 
click, xlk^ used to start horses in the United States is em- 
ployed to stop them in India ; the chirp, psp, used in the 
United States to urge horses forward is used to stop them in 
South Africa; and the hue and dia^ used in France to direct 
animals to the right and left respectively, are said by the 
lexicographers, Malin, Pictet and Littre, to be employed in 
the reverse sense in Switzerland.' 

Somewhat similar contradictions are found in the gestures 
and customs of courtesy of various peoples, and in the corre- 
sponding actions of children. How some of them may have 
arisen, or been perpetuated, may, perhaps, be seen from the 
following account^ given by Colonel Mallery, of the origin of 
two mistakes in salutation : ' The Chinese in Utah fell into 
a curious blunder in using some of our phrases. On meeting 
a resident at any time of day or night they called out " good- 
morning ! " and, on parting, "good-night!" even if it was 
before breakfast. A similar error in imitation was made by 
the Zuhi. When the officers from Fort Wingate visited the 
Pueblo, they were naturally anxious to reach the traders' store, 
so they called out to the first person they met, "How are you? 
Where's the store ? " The Zuhi caught up all the sounds as 
one greeting, and, in the kindness of their hearts, shouted 
them to all subsequent visitors. The salutation, " How are 
you ? Give me a match I " has a like explanation.' ^ 
^ Amer. Anthrop., Vol. HI. p. 206. 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD 1 23 

In many parts of the world, with the introduction of the 
horse and other domestic animals, have gone the call-words of 
the people introducing them. In Hawaii, e.g.^ English call- 
words are used. So, too, the Cairo donkeys ' know the English 
stop, which the boy-drivers now use,' and Bulgarian horses 
'the Turkish ^/rr, "back."' Moreover, some animal-trainers 
are said to use only French words in addressing their animals. 

Animals seem to resemble children in the readiness with 
which they come to recognise varieties of intonation, change 
from one language to another, and in their early life differ from 
their latter years in the nature of the speech-forms which they can 
appreciate. Some more evidence of like import may be expected 
from the study of the cries to wild animals among savages. 

The ''Hearer'' in Language. — Dr Lukens (377, p. 443) calls 
attention to the fact that in most, if not all the current discus- 
sions of the origin of language, the hearer is entirely ignored, 
although ' the question of what sounds will attract the attention 
of, and be understood by, the hearer is at least as important 
a question as what sounds the speaker will naturally make ' ; 
the onomatopoeia will need to be for the hearer as well as for 
the speaker, as evidenced by the hunter's use of the calls or 
warning sounds of animals, etc., ' the sounds to which they 
give heed, and therefore the- first to which they attach mean- 
ing.' According to Dr Lukens, the case is similar 'when the 
mother or nurse imitates the child's babble and says, 
"papapa," or "mamamama," or "baby."' All such words, 
together with ' all the origijtal words for food ' noted by various 
writers, ' are mere natural sounds that come to have a meaning 
by the fact that the parents or others adopt them, and accept 
their use by the child, who thus gradually associates meaning 
with them. It is well known that these same sounds occur in 
nearly all languages, but the meaning varies, especially among 
savage languages, although always pertaining either to the 
child, or parents, or food, or other necessity of the early 
months of life. Baby-talk is of the rankest growth among 
savages, and undoubtedly played a greater roie in the past 
than it does at present, being now so far extinguished by the 
greater necessity of conformity to adult usage.' Somewhat 
similar views were reached by Brinton in his paper on ' The 
Physiological Correlation of certain Linguistic Radicals,' where 
he thus explains the origin and widespread character of such 
' physonyms ' as mama^ 7tana, ana, papa, balm, tata : ' In the 



124 THE CHILD 

infant's first attempt to utter articulate sounds, the consonants 
m^ p and / decidedly preponderate ; and the natural vowel a^ 
associated with these, yields the child's first syllables. It 
repeats such sounds as ma-ma-ina or pa-pa-pa without attach- 
ing any meaning to them ; the parents apply these sounds to 
themselves, and thus impart to them their signification ' 
(p. cxxxiii.). In this way have arisen certain personal pronouns, 
demonstratives, locatives, words of direction and indication, 
whose radicals are these and kindred consonants, thus ac- 
counting for a surprising similarity in the phonetic constitution 
of many of these words in innumerable, unrelated families of 
speech all over the globe. 

Reduplication. — Reduplication, in primitive tongues, is not 
by any means the very simple thing that some writers about 
child-language have made it out to be. Says Dr A. S. 
Gatschet ^ : ' One of the most ancient features of an Indian 
language is reduphcation for inflectional purposes. In this we 
observe a thorough difference between Maskoki and the lan- 
guages west of the Mississippi River. In Maskoki the second 
syllable is the reduplicated one in adjectives and verbs ; west 
of the river, at least in Tonika, Atakapa and Tonkawe, it is 
the first one. Linguists able to appreciate this circumstance 
fully will not deny that it is of great weight in separating 
certain classes of linguistic families from each other, and 
consequently in assigning them different areas in primordial 
epochs. The Sahaptin and Dakota excepted, no other lin- 
guistic family of North America is known to me which redupli- 
cates for inflectional (not for derivational) purposes in the same 
manner as Maskoki.' 

As a means of forming the plural from the singular reduph- 
cation is known to many primitive American tongues, e.g.^ 
Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, Nahuatl, which others, equally primitive, 
such as the Kootenay, know nothing about in this connection, 
just as many languages are unacquainted with the Aryan device of 
forming the preterite of verbs by reduplication. And the modified 
forms of reduplication are by no means all of the sort represented 
by the first word of three syllables coined by the little child 
of Professor Yqtt'i., patata (combined from tata d^ndpapa). 

In some languages reduplication becomes a fine art, or even 
a science. Among the hundreds of reduplicatives existing in 
the Yoruba (a West African language of very primitive charac- 
^ Migr. Leg. of Cj'eeks, Vol. II. p. 71. 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD 1 25 

ter), we meet with not a few like the following : du-du^ ' black ' ; 
fi-fi, ' dimness ' j /2':^, 'glittering'; fu-fu, 'white'; ra-rd^ 
'loudly'; ya-ya^ 'nimbly,' etc. — there being apparently a 
very strong tendency to form adverbs relating to colour, 
motion, etc., by reduplication, a peculiarity noticeable also in 
the Fanti language. 

This use of reduplication is nowhere better seen than in 
the Klamath, an Indian language of Oregon, the grammar and 
vocabulary of which have recently been most carefully studied 
by Dr A. S. Gatschet (239). The following examples will 
illustrate the point : — Red = taktakli ; Rough = kitchkitchli ; 
Slippery ^ laklakli ; Smooth = tatatli ; Strong = litchlitchli. 

The law of least effort encourages reduphcation in child- 
speech, but environment causes it to be almost entirely (with 
the exception of a few imitated or suggested onomatopoeias) of 
the nature described by Dr G. Stanley Hall in the case of a 
young boy (269, p. 133) : ' Pleasure was often found in 
making all possible noises with variations of pitch, stress, etc., 
but whether for ears, voice, or both, none can say. Often the 
talking of adults is imitated by prolonged jabbering, as, later, 
writing is imitated by prolonged quiddling with a pencil before 
letters are known. When told to say after me a hst of words 
of two syllables, the first syllable was almost always repeated, 
e.g.^ Mary was iva-wa, always loudly spoken, for she was a 
big, loud-voiced girl; ]\iXm = du-dii ; Y\X.i\e = 2h-zh ; blanket = 
ba-ba ; faster =/a -fa ; master = ma-ma ; pasture = pa-pa ; 
na.ughty = na-na, etc' These imitative reduplications are 
very common among children, and primitive peoples exhibit 
similar phenomena. 

Child-Language and Primitive Speech. — In a very interesting 
article on ' The Speech of Children,' in the Nineteenth Cejitury 
for May 1897, Mr S. S. Buckman sets forth the following 
theses, which he supports with many data from the observation 
of child-language (90) : — i. The variations of human lan- 
guages originated in the imperfections of human organs of 
speech. 2. All human language could, in the course of time, 
have been developed from the variations made by human 
beings in their efforts, first, to pronounce one original word, 
then to speak the forms this word assumed by such treatment, 
and so on. 3. Such a primordial root may be ^(2^= 'excre- 
ment, disgust.' 4. The infancy of speech in the individual 
shows what was the infancy of speech in the race. 5. The 



126 THE CHILD 

vocabulary of the present-day human baby at twenty months 
old approximately represents the speech of adult pre-human 
ancestors. 6. The speech, with all its imperfections, of a three- 
year-old child would be about the attainment of primitive 
adult human speakers. 7. The speech of children, the slang of 
the play-ground and the talk of the street may all be studied 
for the better understanding of the genesis of human speech. 

The idea that through the attempt to pronounce the first 
word (or words), and through imitation of the variations thereby 
produced, the variations of human speech (aided by the 
pecuharities of the organs of speech at the time) arose, is a 
theory not nearly so difficult to believe as the view that the 
original begetter of all human language was the discomfort 
representing 'root kak'' {cf. Gr. zaxog, Latin cacare, and hoc 
genus omne)^ out of which, by decapitation, decaudation and 
syncope of its descendants, the world of speech and all that 
therein is were born {cent from dakadaka?itam, ' bike ' from 
bicycle, blame from blasphema, are thought to point the ways in 
which such things, were accomplished). Not much more 
satisfactory would be the development of ' the three roots of 
Teutaryan language — ma ("mother"), da or ta ("father," 
"food"), la ("talk")' — out of the ta-la-ma-da series of the 
lullaby talk or babbling of the prattling child. 

Whether the speech of a twenty-months old human child lies 
nearer to that of ' adult pre-human ancestors ' than the speech 
of a three-year-old to that of ' primitive adult speakers ' is a 
matter that calls for very little dogmatism, although, perhaps, 
we underestimate still the real speech-capabilities of both the 
last. Buckman is upon much safer ground when he discusses 
the facts of child-language themselves and their resemblances 
to similar facts in the speech of primitive peoples (the loss of 
initial or final s ; the change of medial or initial s to h; the 
substitution of n or ;^^ for /, of n or /for r ; the interchanging 
of t and k, d and g, w and r, s andyj b and/ ; the dropping of 
initial p ; and the innumerable seeming oddities which lie in 
the child's attempts to reproduce the words and sounds used 
by the adults and others of his environment). Coincidences 
with old Irish, the classic tongues, Polynesian dialects, and 
American or i\ustralian primitive languages, are certainly by 
no means uncommon, though their significance is apt to be 
much exaggerated. In fact, the idea suggests itself that after 
all the child may be as imperfect as reproducer of past human 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD 12/ 

(or pre-human) speech as his 7;iangkoo^e = ^ mantelpiece ' and 
iMa = ' scissors ' show him to be of the present forms of 
human language. His invention rather than his imitation ought 
to be the prime trait allying him with his kin of long ago. 

Following up a rather curious paper by Alfred Russell 
Wallace (673), in which is exploited the relation of mouth- 
gesture and primitive language, Mr Charles Johnston, starting 
from the premise that ' the human race began to talk as babies 
begin to talk,' with the corollary that ' in the prattle of every 
baby we have a repetition, in a minor key, of the voice of the 
earliest man, and by watching the first movements of speech 
in a baby we can see once more the steps in articulate language 
which the whole world of man once took in dim ages long ago ' 
(319, p. 499), reaches the conclusion that 'a vast period of 
vowel-language preceded by a long interval all consonant speech.' 

Vowels and Consonants. — After this came ' a transition 
period of great wealth and variety, where breathings and semi- 
vowels were added to pure vowels ; then arose probably nasals, 
and, last of all, pure consonants.' Of this vowel-speech the 
author maintains that ' it is strictly spontaneous, from within 
outwards ; it is the same in babies of different lands, whose 
parents speak entirely different languages' (319, p. 502). 

Here again the author's data from the language of baby- 
hood are more convincing than his citations from the tongues 
of primitive peoples. The first real speech may have arisen 
from the reduction of the child's a-a-a-a-a, o-o-o-o-o, u-ti-u, etc., / 
to single dimensions, and tata may be one of the omnibus-ex- 
pressions of early human speech, but the statement that the 
Polynesian language represents 'the second period of baby 
talk,' on account of its abundant use of pure vowels, blinks 
the notorious fact that much of the ' vocalic character' of Poly- 
nesian dialects is due to omission and dropping of consonants, 
gutturals especially — a phenomenon very noticeable, e.g., in 
the language of Hawaii. In like fashion elimination of vowels 
has given to some other primitive tongues a very ' consonantal 
character.' These historical accidents and incidents cannot, 
therefore, be made the basis of a comparison with baby-speech. 
The Polynesian language, e.g., is not 'an arrested form of 
baby-speech,' nor can it be said to have inherited from the 
distant past characters which it has only recently acquired. 
Similar criticisms apply to Mr Johnston's general assertion that 
'the speech of Polynesians, Chinese and Negroes — of the red, 



128 THE CHILD 

brown, yellow and black races — corresponds to definite stages 
of baby-talk.' 

According to C. Crozat Converse,^ who holds that ' music's 
mother-tone is man's mother-tone,' the original vowel sound is 
' the primitive a {aJi)^ the first, simplest, easiest of all vocal utter- 
ances, the onomatopic vocable for mother.' Further, we are 
told, ' man, to intensify its love-symbolism in verbal expression, 
gave it the verbo-consonantal prefix, m-ma^ and children verbally 
melodised and sweetened this symbolism by iteration, mama.^ 
The meaning of this mother-tone is thus described: 'The 
mother-tone ^, with the ma, ba of every baby, white or black, 
bond or free, born of ignorant or learned parents, of the baby 
of all nations under the sun — this cry of lamb, kid, calf, with its 
feline and canine modifications, is one of those germs [tone- 
germs found not only in the voice of man but in the voices of 
the animal kingdom], one which expresses a crying desire, 
the immediate satisfying of which is sought.' Thus in the 
very beginning 'onomatopy demonstrates the synthesis of 
man's heart with man's mind.' 

Some writers on the speech of early childhood have not 
only recognised a 'pure vowel period,' but have distinguished 
closely the times of appearance of the individual vowels 
(singly and in combinations), and it seems to be generally 
admitted that vowels precede consonants. The differences in 
individual children are, however, remarkable, and sufficient 
attention has not yet been given to what Dr Lukens has styled 
'mere play sounds,' which, during the first year of childhood, 
' are perfectly free, now exercising the lips, now the tongue 
and palate, and again the throat parts,' etc. Out of the rich- 
ness and variety of this ' primordial babbling ' — to use Professor 
Sully's term — 'a rehearsal for the difficult performiances of 
articulate speech,' the sounds of later life grow by laws yet 
little understood. Preyer inclines strongly to this view, but 
Sully is rather of opinion that ' we have in this infantile 
"/(2-/(2-ing" more a rudiment of song and music than of 
speech,' and would see in this 'voice-play,' more of 'a rude, 
spontaneous singing,' which prepares the way for the pro- 
duction of articulate sounds. He finds here a rapprochenieiit 
to primitive man ; ' the rude vocal music of savages consists of 
a similar rhythmic threading of meaningless sounds, in which, 
as in this infantile song, changes of feeling reflect themselves ' 

(621a, p. 137). 

1 Monist, Vol. V. p. 375. 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD 129 

Thoroughgoing scientific studies of the sounds of early 
child-speech are few and far between, though Tracy, Sully and 
Lukens have not a little to say on the subject in addition to 
the earlier writers, the ' table of mispronounced initial sounds ' 
given by the last being of special value. As Dr Lukens 
justly observes (377, p. 453): 'A little child's mispronuncia- 
tion is rather an indistinctness or vagueness of utterance than 
an out-and-out substitution of a wrong sound for a right one.' 
Professor Sully says (621a, p. 151): 'In certain cases there 
seems little kinship between the sounds or the articulatory 
actions by which they are produced. At the early stage, more 
particularly, almost any manageable sound seems to do duty 
as a substitute.' These facts seem to be paralleled by certain 
phenomena characteristic of not a few primitive tongues. 
According to Father Montoya, there is in the Guarani language 
of South America 'a constant changing of the letters for 
which no fixed rules can be given,' and Brinton cites from the 
Araucanian language of Chile, fide Dr Darapsky, the per- 
mutation b = w=f=u = i=g=gh = hu (73, p. 398). Brinton 
also informs us : 'In spite of the significance attached to the 
phonetic elements, they are in many American languages 
vague and fluctuating. If, in English, we were to pronounce 
the three words loll, nor, roll indifferently, as one or the 
other, you see what violence we should do to the theory of our 
alphabet. Yet analogous examples are constant in many 
American languages. Their consonants are "alternating" in 
large groups, their vowels " permutable." M. Petitot calls 
this phenomenon "Hteral affinity," and shows that, in the 
Tinne, it takes place not only between consonants of the same 
group, the labials, for instance, but of different groups, as 
labials with dentals, and dentals with nasals. These differ- 
ences are not merely dialectic ; they are to be found in the 
same village, the same person. They are not peculiar to the 
Tinne j they recur in the Klamath.' 

The following table contains the order of frequency as initial 
sounds of the principal letters, in the ordinary English Dictionary, 
in the child's vocabulary as estimated by Prof. Kirkpatrick and 
Dr Tracy, and by the present writer in several American-Indian 
languages, in the Yoruba of West Africa and the Chinook 
Jargon. The number of words examined in each case is 
sufficiently large to determine the general character of the 
language. 



i.^o 



THE CHILD 



(-3 -d 'V) qsTi 

-gU3[ UI 3U9UI 

-3[3 paA\oiiog 






CD -i -v) qsii 

-SU3 UI JU3UI 



2^ 



t/j'^ c^ a, ^H c c -tl >-'•'■ 



Co -^ -v) 

■eqniOy^ 



ri .^ ri!i C 'XJ m O- OJ- +-. tOr- 



(U^ [/) in "-Cri:; ?^ 



(■3-J-V)uo2 



c 



(-3 -Jl -V) 



i^^g^^^-^ 



CD -J -V) 

inHAV>[s;M 




CD -J -V) 

T3A\qi[o 




CD 'J "V) 

33-13 


^p^c3S^;^^x.^o>^<u 


(•3 -A -V) 




(•3 -A -v) 

ABuajoo;^ 


rt^ b/jd^-n c/5 ?: P^r^" S t}).^ cr <u o a^ 



•(Ao-BJx) 

An3|nq-BDo^ 

sU3->PUq3 






•(jlDu;i3d[j{Ji;vj) 
A:jB[nqBod^ 

s.u3-ipnq3 



rCi o Oi-w ^Td 2rr:<+H ;h^ toe 



•(Jloi-i;i3d>iJi;vj) 

sosni^' 

uosutqo^j 



in O CX Ct <+H rO 



a;*. ^ 



•(jIou;T3dj[Ji;^) 

Ajeuoijoiq; 

qsiiSug 



C/3 Oh O Cj -M r^ 



i+^a;rJ:5^fc;D^O>cc3 



•ispjo 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD 131 

This table illustrates both the resemblances and the differ- 
ences in the phonetics of primitive languages and the speech 
of children. We, of course, have no details as to the child- 
vocabularies of the primitive peoples, whose languages are here 
represented, but it is very probable that in their phonetics 
such vocabularies will approximate more to the adult speech 
than do the various vocabularies of children all over the world 
one to another. A point of interest is suggested by the last 
two columns in the table (based upon Skeat), which reveal 
certain differences between the ' native ' and ' borrowed ' ele- 
ments of our English vocabulary. Studies along this line 
might be productive of good results. 

In the Dene (Athapascan) languages of North-western 
Canada the consonants preponderate to such an extent in the 
essentials of word-formation that Father Morice does not 
hesitate to say that ' in so far as the root-words are concerned 
the phonetical graphical signs of the Dene languages might 
be reduced, as in the ancient Semitic tongues, to the mere 
consonants.' The following examples will suffice to illustrate. 
The radical t-n-^ d-n-, ' man,' appears, in the various dialects, 
as tana, tane, tani, denu, dene, dane, dine, dune, etc. ; the 
radical Jin, 'earth,' as nna, nne, nni, nnu, nen, nan, etc.; 
the radical fs-, 'beaver,' as tsa, tse, tsi, tso, tsu. In these 
languages, then, 'the vowels are transmutable, and therefore, 
except in a very few cases, no importance whatever should be 
attached to them' (438, p. 150). 

' Clicks ' with Savages and Children. — There are many points 
of resemblance between the languages of primitive peoples and 
those of children, but, all over the world, children seem to 
possess a remarkable ability to produce even the most difficult 
of sounds, if these be at all favoured at the beginning. 
Thus, according to Kussmaul and Gutzmann (261, p. 38), in 
the early period of instinctive speech-production very young 
children utter not only all (or nearly all) of the sounds 
characterising their later adult speech, but can also produce 
'sounds completely corresponding to Arabic and Hebrew 
gutturals,' which adults of Aryan stock find considerable 
difficulty in reproducing at all. Moreover, as Gutzmann tells 
us, children use ' clicks ' very early — clicks that occur in no 
civilised language, but are found in several savage languages, 
such sounds being actually, ' from a mechanical point of view, 
easier for the child to produce than the corresponding 



132 THE CHILD 

explosives.' These clicks survive to some extent, according 
to Gutzmann, in the lip-cUck of the ^ kiss par distance^ the 
tongue-clicks in interjections of sorrow, admiration, etc., and 
in the interjectional exclamations used in urging on horses 
and other animals, but they are little more than very rudi- 
mentary speech-sounds, and not, as in the speech of the 
Hottentots, e.g.^ complete sound - elements. Dr Gutzmann 
cites from Biittner the statement that among the Khoi-Khoin 
the children have a penchant for these clicks, and ' even little 
children a few months old are without doubt able to repeat 
the clicks before they can ^^y papa or mama,'' And not only 
can children of other savage tribes learn Hottentot easily, 
in contrast with adults, but there seems to be no special 
constitution of the child-mouth among the Hottentots for the 
production of clicks. We learn, moreover, that, while the 
Hottentot infant, growing up in a foreign environment, does 
not acquire the click, the children of the European missionaries, 
who grow up among the Hottentots, ' speak the language like 
the natives,' clicks and all. Apparently the speech-capacities 
of the infant, so far as phonetics are concerned, are no less 
wonderful than the accomplishments, later on, of the child in 
the field of the dictionary and the grammar. Herder said : 
' Man is so endowed, so circumstanced, and such is his 
history, that speech is everywhere and without exception his 
possession. And, as speech is the property of all men, so is it 
the privilege of humanity ; only man possesses speech.' Citing 
this passage in his Races of Man (523, I. p. 30), Ratzel 
observes : ' We may add that mankind possesses it in no 
materially different measure. Every people can learn the 
language of every other. We see daily examples of the com- 
plete mastery of foreign languages, and therein the civilised 
races have no absolute superiority over the savage.' This is 
true in all parts of the globe, as Ratzel indicates : ^ Many of 
the persons in high position in Uganda speak Swaheli, some 
Arabic; many of the Nyamwesi have learnt the same languages. 
In the trading - centres of the West African coast there are 
negroes enough who know two or three languages ; and in the 
' Indian schools in Canada nothing astonishes the missionaries 
so much as the ease with which the youthful Redskins pick up 
French and Enghsh.' 

Originality and Logic of Children in Language. — The fact 
emphasised by StoU that ' children create and use for a time 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD 1 33 

linguistic forms that are more logical than those employed by 
their parents or than the usual forms of the language to the 
use of which they are destined' (617, p. 4) is borne out by the 
studies of Horatio Hale (267, p. 113) and others who have 
investigated the phenomena of spontaneously-generated child- 
speech. The logic of the child has been discussed by Munz 
(452), who, starting from the standpoint that 'with the child, 
as with primitive man, the first vocal sounds are the result of 
a mechanical creation, a reflex movement,' points out that 'we 
teach children not language-speaking, but merely our language.'' 
It is the artificial product of centuries of human determination 
and co-ordination, not the logical development to the full of 
an instinctive primitive speech, that we give over to the child. 
It is for this reason that the language of the child under the 
immediate influence and example of adults (who are, logically, 
other-minded than he) differs markedly from the carefully- 
built-up and entirely consistent tongues of many savage and 
barbarous races, while, in their regularity and mode of 
derivation one from another, the verb-forms and inflections 
proper to the spontaneous language of the child often distinctly 
recall the corresponding features of the speech of many primi- 
tive peoples. Such a sentence, e.g.^ as : Dem Papa ivurde ihr 
Buck auf der Mama seinen Platz gelegf, could not exist in 
savage languages. One of the greatest triumphs of human 
language has been to get rid of the 'logical' machinery of 
speech, classification-words, sufiixes, affixes, prefixes, infixes, 
gender-noters, time-markers, action-recorders, place-indicators, 
et hoc genus 07?tne, with which many primitive languages fairly 
riot— to substitute, in fact, a logic of the mind for a logic of the 
tongue, an art of thinking for one of word-making. But so 
free has the language of to-day become from such develop- 
mental-processes that the child, to whom many of them are 
as natural as they were to the first of our race, misses in the 
ready-made speech imposed upon him the stimuli which go so 
far to produce the naivete and the genial side of the highest 
forms of language which, as is well-known, themselves approxi- 
mate often to other, and perhaps higher, ideals born of the child 
himself. 

Child Speech a?td Linguistic Variety. — Mr Hale observes, 
concerning the follov\^ing sentences of a three-four-year-old 
boy (267, p. 99), 'Harry just now see two pigeon-pigeon, fly 
high, high,' 'cat scratch Harry, yes'day,' that 'the philologist 



134 THE CHILD 

will see that, except in the absence of pronouns (and some- 
times even in this respect) it represents the simplest form of 
agglutinative speech, such as we find in the Malay and Manchu 
groups of languages.' Of the speech of a little two-year-old 
boy of his own household, the same competent authority tells 
us, 'They were all monosyllables, composed either of one 
vowel or diphthong alone, or else of a vowel or diphthong 
preceded by a single consonant. Every word ended with 
a vowel [as is the ca*se in not a few primitive languages], 
and two consonants never came together. All his words were 
thus reduced to a form of the utmost simplicity; and, of 
course, the same syllable had many significations.' Mr Hale 
also adds this comment : ' What was particularly interesting 
was the fact that this language took a completely Chinese form. 
In the proper Chinese, as is well-known, every word ends in a 
vowel, either pure or nasalised ; and the great majority of 
words comprise but a single consonantal sound.' Some details 
of the language of a little nephew of the distinguished philo- 
logist, Professor G. von der Gabelentz, are likewise given by 
Mr Hale (267, p. 113). This child called things by names 
of his own invention, and 'in these names the constant 
elements were the consonants, while the vowels, according 
as they were deeper or higher, denoted the greatness or the 
smallness.' Some of these words were, — 

(a) lakail^dJi ordinary chair; lukull =^ gx^dX arm-chair; 
likill=X\\X\Q doll's chair. 

(b) fiiem = watch, plate ; mum --■= large dish, round table ; 
mim = moon ; mim-mim-mwi-mim = stars. 

(c) J>apa = father (every grown-up male person at first) ; 
o-papa (from Grosspapd) = grandfather (other gentlemen) ; 
u-pupu = uncle ; piipu = father with a big hat on, big papa. 

Here we certainly have (as we had in the case of the other 
child a monosyllabic form of speech in the making) the 
beginnings of a system of inflection like that of the Semitic and 
other language-stocks that inflect by means of vowel-change, 
and we can see how, in childhood, languages morphologically 
as distinct as Chinese and Hebrew could readily have arisen, 
even within the same household. There is, therefore, much 
force in Mr Hale's conclusion, — ' It would be more exact to 
say that each linguistic stock must have originated in a single 
household. There was an Aryan family-pair, a Semitic family- 
pair, an Algonkian family-pair. And, further, it is clear that the 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD I35 

members of each family-pair began to speak together in 
childhood. No instance was ever known, nor can one be 
reasonably imagined, of two persons, previously speechless, 
beginning to speak together in a new language of their own 
invention after they had attained maturity. On the other 
hand, many instances are known in which young children have 
devised and constantly used such a language.' Interesting in 
this connection are Dr Lieber's account of the vocal 
sounds of Laura Bridgman, and the remarks of Heinicke 
cited by Wedgewood (678, p. xiv.), from Tylor : 'AH 
mutes discover words for themselves for different things. 
Among over fifty whom I have partially instructed or been 
acquainted with, there was not one who had not uttered at 
least a few spoken names which he had discovered for himself, 
and some were very clear and distinct. I had under my 
instruction a born deaf-mute, nineteen years old, who had 
previously invented many writeable words for things. For 
instance, he called "to eat" mumm^ "to drink," schip_p, etc' 
Origin of Ling^iistic Diversity. — The irrepressibility of this 
language-instinct in early childhood is, Mr Hale thinks, the 
cause of origin of the varieties of human language (107, pp. 
261-267). Not alone the Aryo-Semitic problem, but the 
existence of such a diversity of speech in such comparatively 
limited areas as the Oregon - California region and the 
Caucasus, finds explanation through this theory. To use the 
words of Mr Hale : ' It was as impossible for the first child 
endowed with this [instinctive language] faculty not to speak 
in the presence of a companion similarly endowed as it would 
be for a nightingale or a thrush not to carol to its mate. The 
same faculty creates the same necessity in our days, and its 
exercise by young children, when accidentally isolated from 
the teachings and influence of grown companions, will readily 
account for the existence of all the diversities of speech on our 
globe' (267, p. 47). Hale gives brief accounts of many 
' original languages ' of children, and their great number (for 
they are really not at all rare) affords a point of contact in 
parallehsm with the condition of the earliest known tribes 
of man, for as Powell says (507, p. loi) : ' As we go back 
in the study of languages they are multiplied every- 
where. Mr Cushing . . . comes from the study of one little 
tribe, the Zuhi, and finds its speech made up from two 
or more tongues which have coalesced. And so I might 



136 THE CHILD 

illustrate from the many languages in North America, and 
show that no speech has been found that is not made up 
of other tongues ; all are compound.' According to Brinton, 
also (74, p. 62) : ' Within the historic period, the number of 
languages has been steadily diminishing. We know of scores 
that have become extinct, as many American tongues ; others, 
like the Celtic, are in plain process of disappearance.' 

Hale's view of the child's activity in the origination of 
the diversity of human language and human languages has 
been looked upon with favour by Romanes (547, pp. 138-144), 
Higginson (296), Brinton (74, p. 61), and other authorities. 

Secret Languages of Childre7t. — Following up the articles 
of Dr F. S. Krauss of Vienna, on ' Secret Languages,' Dr 
Oscar Chrisman, a former pupil of the present writer, has 
studied in great detail the passion for ' secret languages ' 
among children, which may be brought into relation with 
the facts adduced by Hale. Dr Chrisman tells us that 'of 
nearly five hundred specimens of secret languages used in 
childhood, I know only one instance where the children 
obtained such from a book. . . . All the other secret 
languages had been either handed down to the users or made 
up by them. In the great majority of the spoken languages 
they were given by somebody to the ones using them, while in 
the written languages a greater number were made by the 
users' (no, p. 55). He remarks upon the universal use of 
secret languages and the commonness of cipher alphabets, and 
Sartori has called attention to the very frequent use of special 
and secret languages by various individuals, societies, classes, 
sects, castes, trades and professions, in all ages and among all 
peoples. 

Dr Chrisman holds that (no, p. 54) : 'This secret-language 
period is a thing of child-nature. There are three distinct 
periods in language-learning by the child. The first is the 
acquiring of the mother-tongue. The second period comes 
shortly after the time of beginning to learn the mother-tongue, 
and is a language made up by children, who perhaps find 
themselves unable to master the mother- tongue. Very few 
children have a complete language of this kind, but all children 
have a few words of such. Then comes the secret-language 
period. Although in a few cases the learning of secret 
languages began about the sixth year, and in some instances 
the period ran till after the eighteenth year, yet the vast 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD I37 

majority of cases are covered by the period between the eighth 
and the fifteenth year, while the greatest use is between the 
tenth and the thirteenth year.' To this classification it may 
be objected that the ' mother-tongue ' is not the first language 
the child endeavours to perfect, but its own tongue, which the 
learning of the mother-language suppresses — at least this is 
a reasonable view to take of the facts in question. This, how- 
ever, need not detract from the pedagogical importance which 
Dr Chrisman attaches to the secret-language period, as being 
'next to the mother-tongue period, the very best time for 
learning foreign languages ' ; these language studies might, 
perhaps, be begun in the lower school grades. 

Not entirely satisfactory, however, is Dr Chrisman's attempt 
to improve upon Mr Hale's theory of the role of child-language 
in the production of the diversities of human speech : ' Thus, 
following Mr Hale's theory, the linguistic stocks might arise 
from the second language period of children, and the varieties 
in the individual stocks might come from the third (secret) 
language period of children. If we should hold that the child 
passes through all the periods of the race — an epitome of 
the race — this secret-language period again becomes an im- 
portant matter ; for it may show that at a corresponding period 
in the race man had an instinct for secret-language-making. 
One family would have its own language, and another family its 
own language ; these in time separating, and each family keep- 
ing up its language, would give to us the linguistic stocks 
or the varieties in the linguistic stocks' (no, p. 58). But 
the utter artificiality in the making of the words of not a few of 
these secret languages, and their great lack of the real raw 
material out of which grew primitive grammar, forbid the belief 
that they have ever played such a role in the history of the 
race as may have done the ' original ' languages of children 
described by Mr Hale, many of which are not mere vocabu- 
laries of words ingeniously contrived and cunningly em- 
ployed, but real, live, growing languages, with all the apparatus 
of grammar and the means of infinite variation and modifica- 
tion. Too many of the secret languages suggest an imitated or 
transmogrified dictionary to be taken as the best efforts of the 
language-instinct of childhood, even though they be almost the 
only noteworthy product of a formative period of child-life. 
In the period of its first origins, language was much more 
naive and socially spontaneous, and the first clamor co?i- 



138 THE CHILD 

comitans did not at all resemble the scene of the three little 
girls, each choosing in order a syllable, and producing, as their 
joint work to express the idea ' the feeling you have in the 
dark when you are sure you are going to bump into some- 
thing,' the word ku-or-bie (no, p. 378). We may be sure 
that the Australian word, pirrakuna, by which the Dieyerie 
tribe of South Australia express the idea ' groping in an 
enclosed space with the hands for anything,' was never created 
in any such deliberate and carpenter-like fashion — and the 
same thing may be said of the great mass of primitive speech. 
Nevertheless, the words which Dr Chrisman cites from a 
dictionary composed by two girls are very interesting and 
suggestive (no, p. 57), although we need the whole two 
hundred to properly orient ourselves regarding them. It 
is very doubtful if such expressions as the following, 
composed by 'a purely mechanical process,' offer real points 
of contact with the language of primitive man, or the real 
'original' language of childhood: BomattIe = w\\Q.rQ utterly 
lost things went, where the light (of a match when struck) 
came from and went to, etc.; dovey = Yf\\er). one seems to 
resemble one's name; ^?7(9 = instinctive feeling that some one 
whom you do not see is in the room with you ; ozvly = feeling one 
has when he has found anything ; /a/^ = feeling of the world 
being like a theatre. Perhaps the nearest approach in all 
to the list of primitive words with life in them and devoid 
of the namby-pambyism of so many of these ' feeling ' words, 
are /^(2/(2/(2 = ' exultant feeling, wild and inspiring, from the 
influence of being out in a wild wind-storm by the sea,' etc. ; 
and sabba = ' individual house-smell.' 

It ought to be mentioned that Mr Hale's theory was 
largely anticipated by Dr von Martius, whose study of Brazilian 
dialects led him to consider the influence of isolated famiilies 
of hunters and fishers upon the variation of language, and the 
effects produced by the adoption by parents of changes initi- 
ated, especially in pronunciation, by children, to say nothing 
of the marked differences existing in the language of indi- 
viduals, all of which contributes to prevent these languages 
becoming stationary, and induces in them countless variations 
of accent, pronunciation, vocabulary, and even grammar and 
syntax. Dr Charles Rau, who remarked that ' it would seem 
that, among savages, children are, to a great extent, the 
originators of idiomatic diversities,' and Oscar Peschel, who 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD 1 39 

emphasised the results, among savage people, of the over- 
indulgence of parents in ' baby-talk,' by which sometimes a 
new dialect has been started (524, p. 44), followed von 
Martius. Not much has been written about the child- 
language of primitive peoples ; we know, however, that much 
of the vocabulary ascribed to the children of savage peoples is 
as far from being original with them as it is with us. Con- 
cerning the child-language of the Iroquois Indians, of which 
not a few specimens are on record (and the same remarks 
apply to the child-language of the Algonkian Indians), the 
Abbe Cuoq, linguist and lexicographer, tells us (106, p. 322) 
that this language which is ' current in every family ' is ' taught 
to the children by relatives, the mother in particular, and the 
child's role is merely one of imitation and reproduction.' 
There are, however, as with us, doubtless many real words 
invented by children among primitive races, but we are not 
yet in possession of facts concerning them. 

Degeneratiofi in Inve?ttion. — As to the inventive stage of 
child-language generally, Dr Lukens very aptly remarks (377, 
p. 442) : ' This inventive stage may degenerate into the 
silHest, emptiest nonsense, holding the child back in his pro- 
gress, and injuring his development permanently if it is too 
far encouraged by parents and others through adopting and 
using the babyish nonsense themselves, or even by recognising 
it and letting the child see that it will pass as language. One 
unfortunate infant, brought up under the tutelage of such a 
Georgy-porgy, wheely-peely baby-talk mother, called a dog a 
" waggy^^^ a cow a " horny ^^^ a horse a " haha^^' a nut a " cacker" 
his nurse " wow-ivow^^^ and a banana a ^^parson,^^ and kept it 
up till he was four years of age (Marion Harland).' 

An interesting example of the influence of ' baby-talk ' is 
given by Mrs Hogan (300, p. 146), where the piggie-iviggie- 
wiggie of some verses improvised by his aunt led a four-year- 
old child to make the request, ' Read the engine-book funny, 
P'^ffy^ puffyi pi^ff-^ The same child had the habit of talking 
himself to sleep with, ^-old, ^^-old, c-old . . . z-o\d. 

Lingidsiic Invention at Fuberty.^ThQ language-creating 
faculty, by no means exhausted in childhood, often reappears 
with remarkable fulness and power in young men and young 
women (the latter especially) in those halcyon days which 
precede the complete attainment of manhood and woman- 
hood. The ' second childhood of love,' as it has been called, 



I40 THE CHILD 

seems to resurrect the old instinct of earlier childhood, and 
give it a temporary range of splendour and luxuriance that 
is sometimes really wonderful. A young woman of twenty, 
known to the present writer, is very fond just at present of a 
language, apparently thoroughly informed with the necessary 
machinery of human speech, and yet entirely her own creation. 
In its vocabulary the following words appear : aglia = ' here it 
is ' ; allia = ' don't you see ? ' bay a = ' yes ' ; bahia = ' yes, 
indeed ! ' biiya or buyunda = ' darling ' ; iydfa = ' I don't know ' ; 
nuk = ' here ! ' nytim = ' hm — hm ! ' piiydl= ' sunset ' ; ?;/// = 
' stop ! ' ydpaca7i = ' always, forever ' ; yug^ ' cold ' ; bu e ld = 
' where are you going ? ' Specimens of sentences as they are 
rattled off, without the speaker as yet apparently knowing the 
exact signification of each word separately, yet having some 
general, hazy idea of the meaning of the whole, are ; Puk-la 
buydt nutiydtd biydka ikdlua bukaletz. Bia esitdtiik. Pfkalati 
buyatitz pikala. Here, as in the early language-creations of 
childhood, we can see a language in the making, and the 
speaker only gradually attains to complete possession and 
control of it, while the hearer feels no such difficulty in its 
comprehension as meets him in the acquisition of a foreign 
tongue after the period of childhood has passed. 

Characteristics of Early Child Speech. — Deville, in some 
very interesting articles in the Revue de Linguistigue, the 
sagacity and ingenious patience displayed in which are highly 
praised by Henri (293, p. 50), notes in particular some of the 
most striking characteristics of child speech. Remarkable is 
the comparatively early age at which the ' faculte de rappel ' 
occurs in children, a nineteen-months'-old girl, e.g.^ ' talked 
just as if she were relating something to her mother.' Curious, 
indeed, are some of the associations that give rise to word- 
making; a girl of nineteen months, e.g.^ called 'soap' 7nene, 
probably from emmener promener (she was washed before 
being taken out to walk), and a girl of six to seven years re- 
marked, 'Nous etions arrives a I'ecole en retot^^ having 'not 
the least intent to create a new word, or the least idea she had 
created one,' for her en retot was as natural as en retard. 
The skill with which children observe and reproduce accent, 
intonation, cadence, etc., is wonderful, their ears seizing an 
infinitude of inflections lost to the adult ear, which is trained 
alone to perceive adult sounds. The child readily distin- 
guishes pa /^='par terre' and /^-/^= 'pate,' and some of its 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD I4I 

performances in the way of accent and intonation rival the 
well-known phenomena of Chinese and other primitive tongues. 
The child's keenness for its own sounds is admirably revealed 
in the case of a little girl (nineteen months of age), who, in- 
different to being called 'Suzanne' or 'Suzon,' and responding 
readily to either of these names, yet reproduces herself 
' Suzanne ' by ia-ia and ' Suzon ' by ia-io^ but refuses to answer 
when called by adults ia-ia or ia-io. A child (389 days old) 
who had been addressed in a somewhat severe tone responded 
imitatively aiata, reproducing the adult's atte?td, attend^ which 
she had just heard ; another child (629 days old) reproduced 
entends-tii by atatu — in both cases the accent was faithfully 
preserved. To the child a single word, often a monosyllable 
like /<2, may have a vast variety of significations, helped out 
by accent and intonation, outnumbering the meanings, e.g.^ of 
tu^ in the primitive tongue of the Fantis of West Africa.^ 

''Sentence Words! — In the course of his chapter on 
'Sentence Building,' Sully takes occasion to remark (625a, 
p. 171): ' It is not generally recognised that the single- 
worded utterance of the child is an abbreviated sentence or 
" sentence-word " analogous to the sentence-words found in the 
simplest known stage of adult language. As with the race so 
with the child — the sentence precedes the word. Moreover, 
each of the child's so-called words in his single-worded talk 
stands for a considerable variety of sentence forms. Thus, 
the words in the child's vocabulary, which we call substantives, 
do duty for verbs and so forth.' Lukens (377, pp. 453-8) 
emphasises the fact that when children in the latter part of 
the first year and the first part of the second year use single 
words to express their thoughts, 'the same word may mean 
very different things, according to its use. Inflection, tone 
and. gesture are everything to the child (Preyer counted eleven 
such meanings of the German atta^ "all gone," as used by his 
boy in the first two years, and nowhere near exhausted the 
list).' As Lukens rightly says : 'Such words are undifferenti- 
ated sentence-words, and are similar to such use of exclama- 
tions as ^^ Fire I" or " Thief I ^' There is no grammar to such 
expressions, since grammar has to do with the relation of 
different words to each other, and here there is only one 
word. Language would mislead us badly if we were hence 
to conclude that the little child in using such expressions does 

'^ Journ. Anthr. Inst., 1896. 



142 THE CHILD 

not really have a true judgment in consciousness. To classify 
such child-words by the adult distinctions of parts of speech 
and say that these children above quoted used the adverb 
'^up^^ [ = desire to be lifted up in arms], the pronoun ";;z^" 
[ = Give me that], the noun ''''horse'''' [ = 1 want to ride], etc., 
but had not yet begun to use verbs, is, of course, simply to be 
misled by very superficial considerations.' For this reason 
children easily turn words into any part of speech, as Shake- 
speare could, and (Dr Lukens remarks) as most grown people 
do occasionally, when 'freed from the thraldom of the 
grammarians.' 

Here, surely, Herbert Spencer's dictum appHes that 
'language was made before grammar,' though certain dialects, 
jargons and slang forms of speech show that it can also be 
made after grammar. The child's ha?td-organing, Tm are (in 
reply to the inquiry ' Are you going ? '), mebbe (for ' it may be 
that '), openit door (with enclitic pronoun), get-go ( = ' get your 
things and let's go for a walk '), and other expressions cited by 
Dr Lukens, find their analogies in the language of primitive 
man, of ignorant, civilised and criminal cultured man. Some 
interesting items as to the ' primitive sentence-words ' (which 
the author, contrary to Steinthal, holds were more like verbs 
than nouns) of American aboriginal languages may be read in 
the linguistic essays of Dr D. G. Brinton, who remarks (73, 
p. 403) : ' Primitive man, said Herder, was like a baby ; he 
wanted to say all at once. He condensed his whole sentence 
into a single word. Archdeacon Hunter, in his Lecture o?i 
the Cree Language, gives us as an example the scriptural phrase, 
"I shall have you for my disciples," which in that tongue is 
expressed by one word.' And this incorporation (holophrasis, 
polysynthesis, etc.) is a very marked characteristic of perhaps 
most American aboriginal tongues. But there is a very wide 
difference between the ' sentence-word ' of the savage and the 
' sentence-word ' of the child, between the Aztec 07iicteniacac = I 
have given something to somebody {0 = augment of the preterite, 
a tense sign; ;^/ = pronoun, subject, first person; <:== semi-pro- 
noun, object, second person; /(? = inanimate semi-pronoun, 
object, third person ; inaca = theme of the verb ' to give ' ; 
<;= suffix of the preterite, a tense sign), which Brinton cites 
as 'a characteristic specimen of incorporation,' and the child's 
'• givej' The last is a primitive monolith, the first a modern 
tenement house. 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD 



43 



Parts of Speech, — But there is, nevertheless, a real resem 
blance between the two ' sentence-words,' as may be seen from 
the following words, quoted by Dr Brinton from Winkler's 
discussion of the Pokomchi, one of the Mayan languages of 
Central America : ' The same word-complex functions here 
as a pure verb, or as a whole sentence, there as an equally pure 
noun ; and again, under some circumstances, what was a verb, 
or a verbal expression, may take on a constructive increment, 
which will transfer it wholly into the adjective sphere.' ^ 

The distribution of the various parts of speech in the 
vocabularies of children has been discussed by several writers. 
Dr Tracy gives the percentage calculated from 5400 words 
as follows : Nouns 90, verbs 20, adjectives 9, adverbs 5, 
pronouns 2, prepositions 2, interjections 1.7, conjunctions 0.3. 
The proportion in the 'boy's dictionary,' cited by Miss Wolff, 
was: Nouns 42 per cent, verbs 30 per cent., adverbs 10 per 
cent., adjectives 8 per cent., prepositions 4 per cent., all 
others 6 per cent. (648). 

Mr SaUsbury found the distribution of the parts of speech 
in his child's vocabulary, at different ages, to be as follows 

(561):- 



Age. 


Nouns. 


Pron. 


Verbs. 


Adj. 


Adv. 


Prep. 


Conj. 


Int'rj. 


Total. 


32 mons. 

Si y'rs. 


883 


24 
22 


321 


60 32 
236 40 


20 
20 


4 
5 


5 

I 


642 
1528 



Dr H. T. Lukens justly calls attention to the doubtful 
value of all classification of children's words according to adult 
ideas, as embodied in the division into * parts of speech,' for 
children, even more than geniuses or jargon-users, and some 
savage peoples, often fail to make any such distinctions what- 
ever, using a noun for a verb, a verb for a noun, an 
adjective for an adverb, or, vice versa, an adverb or preposi- 
tion for a verb. He gives the following interesting examples : 
' It ups its false feet' (said of an amoeba under the microscope); 
'a chop\ = 2ir\ axe); 'the hurt blooded; can I be sorried^ {i.e., 
forgiven) ; to die ( = to make dead, to kill) ; he was ha?id-organ- 
ing, etc. (377, p. 454). Still the parts-of-speech-classification 
does serve as a rude test and is not entirely worthless, even 
^Amer. Antiq., Jan. 1894. 



144 THE CHILD 

though the child is really sentence-wording a good deal of 
the time. 

Dr Tracy quotes Professor Kirkpatrick as giving the corre- 
sponding percentages in the English (adult) language as : 
Nouns 60, verbs 11, adjectives 22, adverbs 5.5, all others 

Comparison with savage languages is very difficult here on 
account of the lack of thorough knowledge of the etymological 
constitution of so many words of the vocabulary and the great 
variation in their form and use, but some commonly-repeated 
errors can now be corrected. 

It has been common to deny to American aboriginal 
languages the possession of true nouns. Brinton states the 
case rightly when he says ' there is often no distinction between 
a noun and a verb other than the pronoun which governs it.' 
But often there are other distinctions (73, p. 3'2o). 

Dr J. H. Trumbull, deeply read in the philology of the 
Algonkian tongues, went too far when he declared every 
Indian name to be a verb, and that ' every Indian noun is 
not separable as a part of speech from the verb. Every name 
is not merely descriptive but predicative.' This statement is 
very justly criticised by Rev. A. G. Morice, who says : ' There 
are in Dene many nouns which have no relation whatever to 
the verb ; nay, the great majority of them is altogether inde- 
pendent and therefore they are just as purely nominative as 
the Enghsh " house," "lake," "bear," etc' Of the primary 
monosyllabic roots, comprising ' about two-fifths of the whole 
aggregate of nouns ' in the Dene language, Father Morice tells 
us : ' They are essentially nominative ; they neither define nor 
describe the objects they designate ; they merely differentiate 
them from one another '(437, p. 176; p. 181). 

Pronouns. — Professor Sully (625a, p. 178) rightly calls for 
carefully-noted data concerning the growth of the use of the 
pronouns in the speech of children ; the lack of distinction 
of persons at a certain early period, however, and the long- 
continued state of confusion in the child's mind, have been 
generally recognised. Interesting in this connection are the 
following remarks of Dr D. G. Brinton (73, p. 396): 'You 
might suppose that this distinction, I mean that between self 
and other^ between /, thou and he^ is fundamental, that speech 
could not proceed without it. You would be mistaken. 
American languages furnish conclusive evidence that, for 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD I45 

unnumbered generations, mankind got along well enough 
without any such discrimination. One and the same mono- 
syllable served for all three persons and both numbers. The 
meaning of this monosyllable was undoubtedly " any living 
being." ' Here we get pretty close to the young child. The 
extraordinary development of the pronouns in many American 
languages — some have as many as eighteen different forms, as 
the person is contemplated as standing, lying, in motion, at 
rest, alone, in company, etc. — Dr Brinton regards as a recent 
outgrowth and development. 

In his discussion of the Chinantec language of Mexico, Dr 
D. G. Brinton 1 cites some very interesting examples of the 
confusion of the personal pronouns in this primitive tongue : 
' It is noteworthy that the pronoun of the third person, quia^ 
may be used for either the second or the first in its possessive 
sense; thus vt chaaqiu quia, "for his sins," instead of vi chaaqiii 
na, as a translation of "for my sins." So again animas quia as 
a translation of "our souls." ' As Dr Brinton notes, 'this is 
analogous to the language of children, who do not clearly 
distinguish persons, and often refer to themselves in forms of 
the third person instead of the first.' 

Order of Words. — The order of words in the language of 
children and in the tongues of primitive peoples seems often 
to be almost entirely controlled by the necessity of speaking, 
and not by any logic of thought. Sully notes the frequency 
with which children place the subject after the predicate, 
the subject after the object, etc. (625a, p. 173). Dr Lukens, 
discussing the linguistic efforts of a twenty-six-months-old 
boy, whose chef-d'oeuvre he cites, observes (377, p. 459) : 'This 
example illustrates very strikingly the fact that, to the child 
at this stage, the order of the words is nothing. He wants to 
say it all at once anyhow, just as he thinks it all at once.' 
Brinton tells us (73, p. 405), concerning a very primitive 
South American Indian language : ' In some tongues, the 
Omagua of the Upper Orinoco, for example, there is no sort 
of connection between the verbal stem and its signs of tense, 
mode or person. They have not even any fixed order.' In 
not a few tongues of savage and barbarous peoples the 
adjective may precede or follow the word it qualifies, and 
adverbs often are equally unfixed. 

Compound Words. — Compound words, in the speech of 
1 Proc, Anier. Philos. Soc, Vol. XXX., 1892. 
K 



146 THE CHILD 

children and the tongues of primitive peoples, offer a sug- 
gestive field for comparison. Says Professor Sully (625a, 
p. 167); 'This process of differentiation and specialisation 
assumes an interesting form in a characteristic feature of the 
language-invention of both children and savages, viz,^ the 
formation of compound words. These compounds are often 
true metaphors.' The order of the components is as varied 
in the speech of the savage as it is in that of the child, and 
the dictionary of the compound words used by any of our 
modern literary artists would contain not a few of the choicest 
productions of the child-mind in its young poetic fury, 

Meani?igs. — Professor J. P. Postgate reports his little 
daughter as saying one day : ' I know three new words — 
" scandalous," " Matthew's man," and " pretty creature," ' and in 
the early stages of the individual, as of the race, the idea 
makes the word. i?/^<?;;2^j-, as the author terms such 'words,' 
are the common property of children and savages ; with both 
the word is a picture of the thing. These idea-words are the 
child's first epics and dramas, existing in gesture forms even 
before the advent of articulate language. Children and savages 
are the word-painters par excellence, and the field of their skill 
lies comparatively unexplored. For psychology, 'the science 
of meaning,' as Postgate calls it — onomatology, sematology — 
is almost virgin soil. Still a few data have been obtained, 
some the unsolicited offerings of the child's mental activities, 
others brought to light by the questionnaire method now so 
much in vogue (501, p. 408). 

The 'Boy's Dictionary' of 215 words, published by Miss 
Fanny E. Wolff, of New York, contains abundant evidence of 
rheme-thinking, as may be seen from the following (689) : — 

Kiss is if you hug and kiss somebody. 

Mast is what holds the sail up top of a ship. 

Milk is something like cream. 

Nail is something to put things together. 

Nut is something with a shell good to eat. 

Old is not new. 

Open is if the door is not closed. 

Opera is a house where you see men and ladies act. 

Pickle is something green to eat. 

Quarrel is if you began a little fight. 

Ring is what you wear on your finger. 

Saw is if you see something, after you see it you saw it. 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD I47 

Tall is if a tree is very big. 

Ugly is if a thing is not nice at all. 

Vain is if you always look in the glass. 

The dictionary in question was, we are told, completed 
before his seventh year by a boy who had spent two years at 
a kindergarten, and was stimulated, doubtless, by the picture- 
blocks, of which he was very fond, since, in the manuscript, 
the words are often provided with rude illustrations. He was 
not an artist nor very imaginative, but took great delight in 
analysis and abstraction, qualities which, at the age of eleven, 
continue to characterise him, and even was fond of spelling. 
With this boy lexicographer may be contrasted as well as 
compared the Cherokee half-breed genius, George Guess, out 
of whose 'dreamy meditations,' and contemplation of the 
English alphabet — he could neither write nor speak English at 
the time — was born the famous syllabary by which the 
Cherokee and related dialects came to be written languages 
for native speakers. Imitation and originality mark both the 
word-expounder and the sound-recorder. On the Cherokee, 
perhaps, the spelling-book he gazed at so often exercised a 
much more potent influence than the dictionary that lay 
unused in the house of the boy. 

In an exquisite little sketch of child-life by William 
Canton these definitions by a six-year-old girl occur (104, 

p. 487).:- 

Brain = What you think with in your head, and the more 
you think the more crinkles there are. 

Dead = When you have left off breathing, and your heart 
stops also. 

Flame = The power of the candle. 

From France we have data of like import. Using always 
the same question {Qu^esf-ce que c'est?), Binet (56) asked his 
two little girls (two-and-a-half and four-and-a-half years old) 
some fifteen times in the course of a year (an interval of five 
months being once left between two experiments) what they 
meant by certain words in common use, and wrote down the 
answers exactly as they were given. A few characteristic 
definitions are ; A knife is to cut meat ; a clock is to see the 
time ; bread is to eat ; a dog is to have by one ; an arm-chair 
is to sit in ; a garden is to walk in ; a potato is to eat with 
meat ; a bird means swallows ; village means one sees every- 
body pass. M. Binet notes the lack of form-descriptions in 



148 THE CHILD 

the children's answers, and the complete prevalence of utilitarian 
ideas — the use of the object fixing itself very early in the child's 
mind. That use and action are the guiding spirits of its 
lexicon appears also from the fact that of the 215 words in the 
'Boy's Dictionary' cited above, 75 per cent, 'clearly express 
definite action.' 

In Monterey County, California, with the assistance of the 
teachers and the approval of the school authorities. Professor 
Earl Barnes was enabled to carry on in 1892 somewhat 
extensive investigations on the lines suggested by Binet. The 
results, based on 50 examination-papers from boys and 50 
from girls of each age between six and fifteen years (in all 
2000 children sent in returns), which contained, as collated, 
37,136 statements (girls 18,979, boys 18,136) about the 33 
nouns, definitions of which had been requested. Here, again, 
it seems, the uses and activities of objects appeal to children 
before structure, form, colour, etc. Of definitions directly 
mentioning use the proportion (boys and girls together) for 
each of the years is as follows : 79.49 per cent , 62.95 P^^ 
cent., 67.02 per cent., 63.83 per cent., 57.07 per cent, 
43.81 per cent., 43.69 per cent, 33.74 per cent, 
37.75 per cent., 30.62 per cent. — or, for all ages, 45.58 per 
cent The proportion of statements of the type, ' a watch is 
a time-piece,' is, for all the years together (boys and girls), 
15,09 per cent. Professor Barnes has examined the definitions 
(of the 33 nouns used in the investigation) given in ' Webster's 
Dictionary,' and finds that ' at fifteen there is about the same 
proportion between definitions of use [e.g., "a clock is to tell 
the time "] and larger term [e^g.^, "a clock is a time-piece "] that 
we find in "Webster," but the qualities are still much less 
developed.' The difference between the child and the adult 
as lexicographers comes out in the prominence given by 
the latter to form substance and structure in his definitions 

(33)- 

One cannot help thinking, however, that the dictionary- 
definitions often lie closer to the child's than those of indi- 
vidual adults, or of adults in general, recorded orally or in 
writing, since the lexicon in this respect, as well as in pro- 
nunciation, lags behind the common speech. Dictionary- 
definitions, too (since Dr Johnson's time, at least), are not the 
free, spontaneous product of adult thought, and hence other 
differences arise. 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD I49 

Very fruitful for psychological comparisons would be an 
examination of the earliest dictionaries of all languages, for 
child-like, indeed, were definitions when vocabulary-making was 
in its infancy. The English dictionaries of the Elizabethan age, 
and the Italian dictionaries of a little later epoch, contain much 
that is analogous with the material accumulated by the re- 
searches of Binet and Barnes. John Baret's Alvearie (1580), 
John Florio's Worlde of Wordes (1598), Wm.^QM^^ Dictionary 
in Spanish and English (1599), Huloet's English Dictionary 
(1552), and Withals' Little Dictionary for Children (1599) — the 
last especially, — are exceedingly interesting from a psycholo- 
gical standpoint in connection with the development of word- 
defining. 

Name-Giving. — To exemplify the resemblances (and differ- 
ences) between the meanings of words in child-speech, the 
language of our own Aryan ancestors, and of certain primitive 
peoples, the following table has been compiled by the present 
writer. It contains the meanings of some thirty words as 
given by two French children (from Binet), two American 
children (from Mrs Hogan), and the radical meanings of the 
corresponding words in French, Enghsh, German, and the 
Klamath, Algonkian, and Kootenay languages of the American 
Indians. It will be seen at a glance that there are individual 
differences in the significations given by children and those 
belonging to primitive tongues, dependent, in all cases, upon 
the diverse reactions to the stimulus of the object named. 
Physical, psychical, sociological, self and altruistic motives are 
all represented, and it might, perhaps, be said that these facts 
illustrate as much the general unity of the human mind among 
all races and all peoples, with its individual variations and 
diversities, as any marked resemblances or differences between 
the child-mind and the mind of primitive peoples, as evidenced 
by the 'science of meanings.' More than all else they seem 
to illustrate the great influence of the immediate and habitual 
environment, of which the savage naturally possesses a greater 
knowledge and has a keener appreciation than a child. The 
same remark would, perhaps, apply here, as in the case of 
drawing, that the observation-gift of the savage makes, as a 
rule, his dictionary a more picturesque, less monotonous, and 
more correct series of word-pictures than the child, in his early 
years, is ever capable of feeling and thinking out, much less of 
recording in words. 



o 

< 


Radical 

Meaning of 

Kootenay 

Words. 


arms and 

legs 
whatrises 

in air 

winged 

what things 
are carried 
in 

what is 
baked 

sun 

plaything 
branches 

what is dug 


11 


'2"S o o 




< 




be >> ^ ?i 

o g^ ^ o-S .- iiS c a 




•2.EE-E 






Hi 




s 




.S<ut: • •■■".^•^ -g ;5^ 
£2^S S2 2 S.t; 2'^ 


< 

o 

o 


la 

J 5 

< ^ 


O'rt o 0-2 o o o'S 0^3^ 


fa 


-^'S OJ o 

;Sgfa^ 










w 

f3 


fa ''^ 


2 ic ic 2*^ S'"2'"22.S!i 2^ 2 2 


> 

2 
o 


1 


^n WW pquQfifa^fa faO 






2'^ 



to s 



M [/I rt rt 1) rt a 






£ .5 ^ 






.'S".2' 



-= .J ?J J^ 





O O ^ii-- . 






^ ^ 


^SS-^Sa^ 


^ i^ 


O G 


o-^ 9. ^S- 


O 


o c 



o'-S 


D 




^ 


o — 


o 



O-Q O 



o.s 

.2 a > 

Ml o'-G 



.5 ^. 



•=^ 5^ o o o 


o ^ 






O j,'^!C"^"g'^.G 






tfgs^im 


Hl^i 


iUj-.0<UO«0 — 


o ^ 






3 ii ^ 
O-G „ 



S sl 



+-I 1) 



O O' 



<U (U ' 

§2' 



ft.B"-2 
o"^ o 



A U G 

>,'a-- bi) a'^ 



M ffi 



.^ G 






^^ 



152 THE CHILD 

Some of the actions of primitive peoples in novel situations, 
and their appreciations of new facts, bring them often into com- 
parison with children. Of the Cree Indians of the Athabasca 
Territory in North-western Canada, we read : ^ 'Of all the 
animals the pigs astonish the Indians most. They call them 
kokosh muskwa (things like bears), and they are afraid of them 
more than if they really were bears. It is very amusing to see 
them running for all they are worth, and climbing up a rail 
fence just to get out of the way of one of these very harm- 
less creatures. Nothing, however, amuses or interests the 
Indians more than the tame ducks; they cannot understand 
how it is the ducks should go down to the river, take a 
swim, and then go home and take food out of Mr Brick's hand.' 

Bishop Bompas ^ observes, concerning the Indians who 
speak the Tukudh language (p. 98) : ' All articles in use 
by the whites are named by the Indians without hesitation, 
according to their employment. A table is what you eat on ; 
a chair, what you sit on ; a pen, what you write with. A watch 
is called the sun's heart. A minister is with them the speaker, 
and a church the speaking-house. So a lion is called the hairy 
beast, and the camel the one with the big back. A bat is 
called the leather-wing because such is its appearance. Thus 
an Indian is never at a loss for a name. A steamboat, before 
it was seen by the Indians, used to be called the boat that flies 
by fire ; but since they have seen it, the fire-boat seems to be 
name enough.' These Indians are 'quick at learning by the 
eye, but slow if taught by the ear ' ; even in matters of Christi- 
anity they would be ' better schooled by example than by 
precept.' The Tukudh would seem to be eye-minded. There 
is need for a careful study in psychological etymology in order 
to determine in how far savages are eye-minded, ear-minded, 
motor-minded. 

Name and Thing. — Dr Friedrich Polle, in his interesting 
little book, Folk-Thought about Language, gives the following 
examples illustrative of children's ideas of the name and thing, 
and the relationship of these : — 

I. A little German girl : ' When I am big and am called 
mother I shall cook giblets every day.' 

1 Canad. Iizd., Vol. I., 1891, p. 342. 

2 Colonial Chw'ch History of the Diocese of the Mackenzie River ^ 
London, 1B88. 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD 1 53 

2. Six-year-old boy of Saxony: 'Who is going to be 

Prmce George now ? ' — Said when he heard that, owing 
to the death of King John, the Prince Royal, Albert, 
would be king, and Prince George become Prince 
Royal. 

3. An eight-year-old German girl : ' Do the people on 

Venus know that they live on Venus ? ' 

4. A little German boy : ' Mama, do the animals know 

their names ? ' — ' I'm glad of that — how ashamed the 
ox, the ass and the monkey would be ! ' 

In the collections of children's sayings and questionings 
much more of the same import is recorded. To a child 
there is something in a name, and the 'it is ' and ' it isn't ' 
of children's plays and games represent a philosophy of 
the y^hyog, akin in some respects to the religious word-cult 
of adolescence, and the battling for the word which has 
characterised most religions in the early stages of civilisa- 
tion. Many of the versions of the famous 'it's a mouse,' 
' it's a rat ' contest of the married couple belong here 
also. The uncultured peasant and the uncontaminated 
savage seem sometimes to be in the same stage. The 
peasant's naive question of the astronomers : ' How did 
you find out the names of the stars ? ' is all too common. 
Polle cites the following apt illustration : ' An Austrian, a 
Hungarian and an Italian were disputing about the beauty, 
etc., of their respective mother-tongues. The Austrian finally 
admitted that, while it might be uncertain which language was 
the most beautiful, there could be no doubt but German was 
the most correct. I'll prove it. You, Hungarian, what do you 
call the contents of this glass ? Viz. And you, Italian ? Acqua. 
Good, I like that. We call the contents of this glass Wasser 
(water), and not merely do we call it so, but it is Wasser 1 ''-^ 
The beUef in a connection between name and thing lies 
on the surface here. As Dr Polle remarks, the illiterate 
peasant hardly believes in the actual existence of foreign 
languages, preferring to look upon even the most unintel- 
ligible of them as distortions of his own speech (499, pp. 
24-27). 

The savage, if the present writer's experience does not 



154 THE CHILD 

deceive him, is less prone to take such views, either of par- 
ticular words or of particular languages. He will admit that 
water can be named by another word than that which belongs 
to his own tongue, and will admit also the independent 
existence of other forms of speech than his own. There are 
many exceptions, but it requires, perhaps, the isolation of the 
peasant and his mental indolence, or a dash of civilisation, 
such as the earliest Greeks had, to deliberately use such 
expressions as ^dp^apoi and the like. The use of language 
is too well understood by most primitive peoples to be 
so despised even when . heard upon the lips of a stranger. 
In fact, the very multitude of languages in the earlier 
history of the race, and the nomadic character of many 
of the earliest groups of men, together with the great native 
ability for language acquirement, an art highly valued 
when other arts were 'few and far between,' tended to 
inspire interest in, or respect for, rather than despisal of 
alien speech. Woman's great share in the origin, develop- 
ment and diffusion of language — both her cosmopolitan 
and her conservative instincts — served in the same cause, 
and strengthened the feehng for the toleration of others' 
speech. 

To the peasant the name Wasser means wafer, and in 
itself carries no specific characteristic of the object named. 
Both the child in his invented names and the ignorant 
peasant in his received names are often on an entirely 
different plane from that of the savage, with whom names 
are very frequently word-pictures of the things denoted 
by them. In the days when, as Max Miiller has it, every 
root was significant, the associations these words evoked 
must have kept men from falling into the condition of the 
Austrian peasant. 

Nevertheless, many savages do have the idea of the indis- 
soluble oneness of name and thing, as the religion and mytho- 
logies of primitive races, and of our own, in the earlier stages of 
its existence, amply testify. 

The folk-lore of the word, the primitive philosophy 
of the Xhyog, is exhaustively treated by Ferdinand von 
Andrian in his essay on ' Word-superstitions ' (9), where 
he has gathered together a mass of data from all ages 
and peoples relative to the nature and power of the 
word spoken and written, understood and unintelligible. 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD 1 55 

significant and meaningless, shouted and whispered, sacred 
and profane, old and new, harsh and gentle, alone 
and in a sentence, single and repeated, forwards and 
backwards, permanent and mutable, helpful and injuri- 
ous — all evidencing the truth of the declaration of 
Freidank : — 

Krut, Sterne, unde wort 

diu hant an kreften grozen hort. 

I Herbs, stars, and words 

I. Of powers they have great hoards. 

c 

Words can take away the mind of man, the sharp- 
ness of the sword, the burning power of red - hot 
iron, make trees fall, mountains open, rocks move 
apart, rivers, lakes and seas divide. Words can bring 
fortune and ill-fortune, influence the gods, charm spirits, 
elfs and fairies, summon up and drive away imps and 
devils, still wind and wave or call them up again. Power- 
ful, all-efficient is the mere utterance or use of the charm- 
word though priest, hunter, witch, lover know nothing of 
its real import. The word of the mouth and the word 
of the hand have gone on parallel lines, the meaning 
of the swastika is often as little understood as that of 
the 'open sesame.' 

The French idioms whose disjecta membra appear in our 
modern novels and legislative addresses, the Latin in the 
ignorant physicians' prescriptions, the Sanskrit words written 
with Chinese signs by the Buddhists of the Celestial Em- 
pire, the mystic syllables handed on from one religion to 
another, the reverence of many existing savage and barbar- 
ous tribes for anything written, the inscribing, carving, and 
stamping of names in out-of-the-way and inaccessible places 
no less than in public and private haunts, all testify how 
far men still are from giving up all superstition of the kind 
suggested by the thought : ' In the beginning was the word, 
and the word was God.' 

The ' magic of the word ' often brings childhood and 
savagery, or, at least, barbarism, very close together; both 
the child and the primitive man, in the exuberant exercise 
of a new power, are word-worshippers, and words, with 



156 THE CHILD 

meaning or without, are alike precious to both. It seems 
also that concomitant action (religious rites, games, political 
meetings^, social gatherings, etc.), not only, as Noire and 
others would have us beheve, called forth language itself, 
but has also served to keep much of it primitive and almost 
unmeaning from the earliest ages down to the present time. 
Especially has this been the case when, by reason of the 
employment of adults in other ways, certain concomitant 
actions have been left altogether to children. 

Between the folk, the savage and the child, the chief 
points of resemblance with respect to the various phenomena 
of word-use now under discussion seem to lie in the 
feeling for the power of the word, the frequent neglect 
of sense for sound, the keen sense of the belonging to- 
gether of name and object or thing, person, or place 
named, the ' painful exactness ' of formulas, and some- 
times even of the minutiae of pronunciation, accent, 
etc., the attribution of some knowledge of some sort of 
speech to everything in the world, the ingenuity displayed 
in the invention of nicknames, and the multiplication of 
the names of objects or persons liked or disliked, loved or 
feared, taboos, omissions, and suppressions of the names bad 
or good. 

Speech Disturbances and Child-Speech. — Certain of the 
phenomena resulting from speech-disturbances in adults 
are, outwardly at least, identical with the language-play 
so common in young children. Of this type is often the 
* verbigeration ' common in patients suffering from kata- 
tonia, which, according to some authorities, resembles the 
chatter and word-repetitions of primitive peoples. Drs 
Peterson and Langdon, ^ in their study of katatonia, say 
concerning a woman of thirty-one : ' She began to recite 
all day long, every other day, with great rapidity, and 
with infinite variations, in rhymes of unintelligible words 
as follows : " Moccasins, voccasins, doccasins, crockasins, 
lockasins, tockasins, jockasins, hockasins ; babies, tables, 
gabies, habies, sables, labies, mabies, kabies; nobis, gobis, 
jobis, chobis, sobis, pobis ; tikater, fikater, sikater, likater, 
mikater," and so on, ad infinitum. She changed to an- 
other word only when the possibilities of rhymes were ex- 
hausted.' A few months later 'she gave up the rhyming 
1 Med. Rec, N. Y., Vol. LH. p. 476. 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD 1 57 

assonances and returned to the old phrase, with occasional 
variations : " I want to go home to my children in New 
York; won't I be glad when I get home to my children 
in New York ! What good times I'll have when I get 
home to my children in New York ! . . . to my cosy 
home in New York . . . When I get into the car which 
takes me to my husband and children in New York." This 
was the refrain for many months, on alternate days, accom- 
panied as before by rhythmic gestures of both arms in the 
supposed direction of New York.' Another patient, a man of 
fifty-five, had not spoken for three weeks, 'except to repeat 
constantly meaningless syllable combinations, like, " Oh ! 
warmee, oh ! warmee, oh ! warmee ; oh ! huminum, oh ! 
huminum, oh ! huminum ; oh ! wow wow woro, oh ! wow 
wow woro ; oh ! wody wody wody, oh ! wody wody wody, 
oh ! wody wody wody ; oh ! kody body, oh ! kody body, 
oh ! kody body ; oh ! widdy widdy, oh ! widdy widdy ; oh ! 
hum yankum, oh! hum yank-um, oh! hum yank-um.'" 
These words were uttered 'with greater or less rapidity, 
in varying keys and with strange gesticulations and great 
earnestness of manner for 15 or 20 minutes, when he would 
be silent for some hours and then start off with another 
combination.' 

Dr Ales Hrdlicka (307, p. 385), who has made a special 
study of 'Art and Literature in the Mentally Abnormal,' 
based upon data obtained from various institutions for the 
feeble-minded, epileptic and insane in the State of New York, 
maintains that ' the insane or the epileptic genius is a thing 
largely of romance, or, at least, is not to be found in the 
state institutions for these classes of patients,' and there- 
fore, 'the study of art and literature among the various 
classes of the mentally abnormal resolves itself principally 
into a study of the effects of the various abnormal mental 
conditions on the previously-acquired abilities of the in- 
dividual, and, additionally, into a study of what can be 
effected by training with some classes of patients in these 
conditions.' 

The neologisms of the insane, which have been studied by 
Tanzi (627), their compound words, nonsense-syllables, etc., 
offer another field for comparison with the speech-phenomena 
of children and of primitive peoples. 

The soliloquy of the insane has been investigated very re- 



158 THE CHILD 

cently by Professor A. Raggi, ^ who found it to be substantially 
the same in context with the ordinary language of the patient, 
and, except for excessive animation and gesture-action, differing 
in little from that of normal individuals. The soliloquy of the 
insane (not the result of artifice or simulation) differ from the 
other modes of speech in being disconnected with the purpose 
for which speech is meant to function. It occurs rather more 
often in women (40 per cent.) than in men (32 per cent), and 
'occurs both by day and by night most commonly, rarely by 
night alone, and is, perhaps, rarer rather than more frequent 
with the insane than with the sane during sleep.' Data for 
comparison of the soliloquy of the insane with the soliloquy of 
the child are not as yet forthcoming. The numerous studies 
of the various forms of aphasia and other disturbances of 
language have resulted in the accumulation of many facts, 
which have been held to make for the parallelism of certain 
linguistic phenomena in the child, the savage, and the patient 
whose speech-functions have been disturbed. It is maintained 
also that, in the gradual disappearance of language in the 
adult suffering from such linguistic disturbances, the more 
concrete, the latest-acquired parts of human language, are the 
first to be lost, the more abstract and symbolic, the latest and 
best organised, being the last to give way. Nouns disappear 
before verbs, adjectives, pronouns, adverbs, prepositions and 
conjunctions; and written language, of course, suffers more 
than oral speech (377, p. 425). 

The existence of a parallel between the imperfections of 
the language of the learning child and the pathological pheno- 
mena in the speech of adults whose language-functions had 
been disturbed is stated by Preyer (511, p. 1 16) in the following 
terms : — 

'When an adult, in consequence of a stroke of apoplexy, 
lesion, or any cerebral disease, disorder of hearing, derange- 
ment of the functions of the larynx, or of the tongue, lips, or 
even teeth, is deprived of the right use of speech, then the 
disturbances of speech which have been carefully observed by 
various clinicists are not merely somewhat similar in general, 
but are identical with those of the child just learning to 
speak.' T"hc faults of speech in the adult here occur 
' because his speech mechanicism is no longer normally 
constructed,' while the incorrectness of the child's speech and 
^ Maiiicomio, 1898, p. 421. 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD 



159 



understanding of speech is due to the fact that 'his small 
speech apparatus is not yet fully developed in all its 
parts.' 

: Compayre (123, p. 213) also notes this 'striking parallel'; 
in all the forms of aphasia, ' whether by lesion of the organs, 
by enfeeblement of the intelligence, or by defect of will-control, 
the adult may relapse into those peculiarities, which, in the 
child, mark the first attempts at speech, and reproduce them 
in a sort of caricature ' — but what is disease with the one is 
only lack of power with the other, and the progress of the 
child step by step up the grades of speech is as charming as 
the spectacle of the morbidly fatal despoilment of the adult of 
bit after bit of his language is painful. Between the two lies 
all the difference between decay and play ; there is never quite 
a perfect resemblance between the logorrhoea of the insane and 
the chatter of the child, between the silence of the latter and 
that of the melancholiac — for human genius is ever in the 
child. 

Dr H. T. Lukens (377, p- 427) has compiled the following 
table (based upon the data in Ross's Aphasia and upon the 
records of child-speech) to show the 'close agreement ' be- 
tween the progressive development of the speech-disturbances 
in the adult and the development of language with the 
learning child : — 



Stage. 


Adult (Aphemic). 


Stage. 


Child (Learning to Speak). 


5 


Grunting sounds, and syl- 


L 


Automatic cries and reflex 




labic utterances not 




or impulsive sounds. 


4 


forming any word. 
Occasional and recurring 


H. 


Imitation of sound, but 




utterances of no speech 




without meaning ; 




value. 




child babbles back 
when addressed. 


3 


A few intelligent replies 


HL 


Understands words, but 




to questions in single 
words. 




does not yet speak be- 
yond such words as 
' mamma,' * papa,' ' no,' 
etc. 


2 


Repetition of words and 
reading aloud. 


IV. 


Repeats words as signs 
when they are said to 
him. 


I 


Spontaneous vocal speech 


V. 


Uses words to express his 




in sentences. 




thoughts. 



t6o the child 

^^'c need, however, more data for the thorough interpreta- 
tion oi' this parallel between the child's progress from 
automatic and reilex (instinctive) phonetic heterogeneity to 
the thought-words, and that of the aphemic adult from 

the sentence to the wcM-dlcss grunt, the progress of evolu- 
tion and the regression oi' degeneracy. Some writers, 
upon uncertain evidence, have credited savage peo[>les with 
a form oi' speech belonging to the lowest group of stages 
indicated in the table above, but, so far as known, there 
exists no tribe of men upon the globe without a language 
much belter organised than the beginning of the child's 
or the end oi' the adult's. 

rih\:h//dry. — In his LiCfuriS on the En^IisJi lAini:^ua^t\ 
published in iScu, Trofessor G. V. ]\larsh made (p. iSi) 
the statement that 'few writers or speakers use as many 
[words] as \o,ooo \ ordinary persons of fair intelligence 
not above },ooo or 4000 ' ; while occasionally one person 
might be able to use ^0,000. ox half of the English 
words then reckoned to be in vogue. This statement 
induced Professor !•]. S. Ilolden (^^01. p. lO) to make a 
careful inquirv into the state oi his own vocabularv, taking 
a 'word' to be 'a symbol printed in capital letters in 
\\'ebster's Dictionary, edition of 1S5:'.' ]\larsh afterwards 
explained his "word" to be the philological term, by 
virtue of which only the simple and not the inflected form 
oi the ^■ocables was counted. Holden's conclusion — he 
estimated his own at ^:;3.456. and discovered that the 
vocabulary oi the assistant librarian in the Patent Ottice 
was larger than his — was that ' },o,ooo words is not at all 
an unusual vcu\ibulary.' For comparative purposes he esti- 
mated the vocabulary of Shakespeare (mimis all verbs spelled 
like nouns\ from Mrs Clarke's Co^icordar.iW to amount to 
24,000 words ; M^ilton's. from Cleveland's Con:orda:'h\\ for 
the poems alone (the prose would give a larger number\ 
i;,^^;;; the English Bible, from Cruden's Coneorda-'uw -jzoq 
(exclusive of proper nanies) : l\"isworth's J?:Vf:\uii7rv rf the 
^■h;i^'o-Sjxo>' Zar^-'UJ^v (which contains 'few words not in 
full use before 1100 a.i\'\ it.ot^i Hotteii's J?h-th'>>:i7rv of 
Shi':c. 10, coo. Ploldcn's conclusions have been verified, 
so t'ar as the vocabularv of a professional man is con- 
cerned, and the statcnient caii satcly be made that ' many 
men have vocabularies of over '10,000 words." There seems 



THE LANGUAGE OV CHrLDHOOT) 



iGi 



little foundation then for the opinion, common at the time, 
that 'a child uses less than jooo words, an ordinary man 
uses from 3000 to 4000, an accomphshed writer about 
10,000.' 

Mr E. A. Kirkpatrick ^ estimates his vocabulary of words, 
whose meaning was known to him at sight, at 70,000 
words, the number of really different words being about 
35,000. Mr Kirkpatrick mentions the fact that the vocabu- 
laries of specialists are very large, 'a well-read botanist 
having a technical vocabulary of 10,000 words, and a zoo- 
logist an even greater number.' Robinson Crusoe^ a book 
which 'children of ten to twelve years read with pleasure, 
and have pretty clear ideas of the meaning of nine out 
of ten of the words used in it,' contains not less than 5000 
to 6000 words. 

In his essay on 'Language and the Linguistic Method,' 
Professor S. S. Laurie made the following statement : ' In the 
child up to the eighth year the range of language is very small ; 
he probably confines himself to not more than 150 words.' 
When criticised by Mr' Salisbury for so extraordinary a state- 
ment. Professor Laurie offered the explanation that the idea 
was originally due to Max Miiller, and he thought that ' the 
child probably confined himself to 150 words in ordinary con- 
versation,' an observation which did not mend matters much 
According to Mr Salisbury (561, p. 290), the carefully checked- 
off vocabulary of his little boy, when 5 J years of age, consisted 
of 1528 ' understandingly used ' words, not counting participles 
and (except in the case of pronouns) inflected forms. More- 
over, the mother's record of the same child's vocabulary, when 
32 months old, counts up to 642 words. 

The following list of words in child vocabularies, from 
Tracy's data, indicates the great variation existing between 
the number of words used by children of like ages, sexes, 
environments, etc. : — 



Sex ... 




— 


_ 




B. 


B. 


B. 


B. 


B. 


B. 


G. 


G. 


G. 


G. 


G. 


G. 


G. 


G. 


o.|o. 


Age (months) 


9 


T. 


12 


15 


12 


19 


24 


24t 


28 


30 


17 


21 


22 


22 


23 


24 


24 


25 


27' 28 


Vocabulary . 


9 


10 


8 





4 


144 


139 


285t 


677 


327t 


35 


177 


28 


., 


136 


36 


263 


,50 


I7I45I 



^ Science, Aug. 21, 1891, p. io']. 
L 



l62 THE CHILD 

Preyer (511, p. 120), from the examination of the 
vocabularies of nine children (girls 8, boy i) two years 
of age, found the number of independent words used by 
them to vary from a minimum of 173 to a maximum of 
1121. 

Many of the strange ideas concerning the languages 
of primitive peoples are to be traced back to the com- 
parative philologists, who write of the scanty vocabulary 
of miners and peasants, and of savage peoples who 
cannot speak in the dark because their gestures could 
not be seen. Max Miiller, e.g., while he admits that the 
English Dictionary contains 250,000 words, holds that 'for 
all the ordinary purposes of life a dictionary of 4000 words 
would be sufficient,' and that ' most of us never use 
more than 3000 or 4000 words, and we are assured that 
there are peasants who never use more than 300 or 400.' 
To be sure, he says likewise (450, p. 11): 'This does 
not mean that they would not understand more than that 
number, for the Bible which they hear in church contains 
about 6000 words. These they would understand more or 
less accurately, though they would never think of using 
them.' 

Vocabularies of Prwiitive Speech. — How utterly unfounded 
some of these ideas are, even a casual glance at the 
lexicographical results of the philological researches among 
the American aborigines alone would serve to show. 
The approximate number of words in certain Indian 
dictionaries is as follows : Navaho (Matthews, 1891), 
10,000; Cree (Vegreville, 1865-1879), 17,000; Montagnais 
(Vegreville, 1891), 18,000; Dakota (Riggs, 1852-188 — ), 
20,000; Cegiha (Dorsey, 188 — ), 20,000; Blackfoot (Mac- 
lean, 1887), 25,000; Tuskarora (Hewitt, 1886), 30,000; 
Micmac (Rand, 1849-1894), 30,000; Yahgan (Bridges, 
188 — ), 40,000; etc. Certain writers, like Keane (322, 
p. 49), have seen fit to think that some of these primi- 
tive peoples are 'strangely credited' with such vocabu- 
laries, but the reading of Mr Hale's excellent discussion 
of ' Language as a Test of Mental Capacity ' ought to 
reconcile them to the right view of the case. In fact, 
the estimates in question err in being too small rather 
than too large. 

How incomplete some of these dictionaries really are, 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD 1 63 

can be seen from the confessions of the authors. Of 
his Cree dictionary, Father Vegreville observes : ' Many 
words which might have been included have been pur- 
posely omitted because of their simple and easy forma- 
tion by means of rules given in the grammar' (Pilling), 
and Vegreville speaks of his dictionary of the Montagnais 
(an Athapascan dialect) as 'containing about 18,000 words, 
out of which one might form more than 100,000 by 
means of the rules laid down in the grammar, third part.' 
Father A. G. Morice's dictionary of the verbs of the Carrier 
(an Athapascan dialect) language, though embracing, at 
the time noted by Pilling,^ only a — c, covered 128 pages, 
small quarto ; while his 96-page ' grammar of the conjugable 
parts of speech of the Carrier tongue ' contained ' four 
chapters, subdivided into 19 articles and 132 rules.' Dr 
Anchorena, in his grammar of the Kechua language of 
Peru, gives over 600 modifications of the infinitive of the 
verb munay, 'to love,' formed by the infixation of particles, 
or the modification of the vowels of the theme; while the 
Abbe Ferard, author of a MS. dictionary of the Ojibwa 
language, informs us that ' the number of the roots [in 
Ojibwa a root is properly the qualificative applied to natural 
objects to specify them] amounts to about 1300,' while 
'the number of natural objects known to the Indians, and 
employed in composition, that is, specified by a qualifica- 
tive, amounts to about 445 (493, p. 192); and we have, 
besides, all the derivative meanings of the roots and the 
composite words which go to make up the newer portions 
of the vocabulary.' 

Rev. A. G. Morice finds among his 370 Dene roots 
separate terms for 'the lying down (verbs)' of — (i) liv- 
ing animals ; (2) lifeless animals and their empty skins ; 
(3) one single object with no striking characteristic; (4) 
several non-particularised objects ; (5) soft things (finen, 
tanned skins, etc.) ; (6) granulous things (sand, sugar, 
etc.) ; (7) long objects, like wood ; (8) round (but single) 
objects; (9) liquid objects; (10) coagulated objects; (11) 
objects in an uncovered recipient. In the ordinary every- 
day vocabulary of the various dialects of the Athapascan 
family of speech there exists 'a prodigious exuberance 
1 Atkap. BibL, p. 73. 



164 THE CHILD 

of differentiating forms.' Father Morice, to whom the 
Carrier dialect is almost his mother-tongue, assures us 
that 'in spite of its 150,000 or so verbal terms, the 
Carrier vocabulary does not contain a single genuine 
equivalent for "brise (etre), to be broken.'" But it 
possesses instead 'no less than no particularising sub- 
stitutes, not one of which could be indifferently used 
for the other.' These no verbs, we are told, have 
reference to — '(i) The object employed to operate the 
breakage, viz., the fists or the feet, a stick, or a whip,' 
or of the cause of such action, as the wind, the 
explosion of fire-arms, etc.) ; (2) the manner in which 
the object has been affected, that is, whether it has been 
broken in one place or in many, by the middle or 
otherwise, purposely or by accident, violently or by 
gentle pressure ; (3) the form of the object qualified, 
that is, whether it is elongated or spheroid, occupying 
a vast place or not, etc' Besides all this, each of 
these no distinct verbs 'can be multiplied by four or 
five, according as we give them the iterative, initiative, 
terminative, etc., forms, whereby their signification is also 
unchanged.' And other verbs rival, and often greatly 
exceed 'in the variety of their forms and the precision 
and nicety of their distinctions,' the one just noticed 
— the verbs of locomotion especially. Says Father Morice : 
' The single paradigm of the verb " to go " includes in 
my dictionary verbs that are totally different according as 
to whether the locomotion thereby expressed takes place 
on two or on four feet ; by running or hopping ; tottering 
as a drunk man, or with the help of a staff; creeping 
like a snake, or jumping as a frog ; swimming or float- 
ing ; " packing " or skating ; playing or in a state of 
madness ; whistling or speaking ; singing or grumbling ; 
laughing or weeping ; in sleigh or canoe ; paddling or 
sailing ; diving down or in parallel line with the surface 
of the water, etc. ; also according as to whether the move- 
ment is that of an empty canoe, or that of the sun, the 
stars, the clouds, the wind, the snow, the rain, the water, 
the earth (?>., relatively to a person drifting down stream), 
the fire, smoke, fog, ghosts, human mind, featherdown, 
diseases, news, etc. ; or, again, whether it is that of an 
object elongated or spheroid, heavy or light, liquid or 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD 165 

liquifiable, granulated, massive, soft, etc., etc.' And further, 
all these verbs are modifiable according to where the 
motion takes place (in fire, in water, etc.). Lastly, 'by 
giving them the negative, usitative, causative, causative- 
potential, defective, reciprocal, initiative, terminative and 
iterative forms, each and every one of them will thus 
be multipHed by the number of forms assumed.' This 
' fecundity of the locomotive verbal stems ' is surpassed by 
the ' prodigious particularising power evidenced by the 
objective verbs.' Of one of these. Father Morice observes : 
'The single paradigm of the verb "to put" contains in 
my dictionary (which could be more complete) over 3000 
verbs, all of which differ in meaning as well as in 
material structure. And this number is repeated in con- 
nection with almost all the other objective verbs, which 
are quite numerous ! ' 

Contents of Children's Minds. — What a contrast between 
this infinite variety, which seems never to stale, and the mono- 
tonous, all-inclusive ' There it goes ' of the English boy, and 
the ' Fix it ' of the American. A parallel between the 
Indian (adult or young) and the civiHsed child is hardly 
possible here, nor does the ' everything goes ' of the slang- 
minded help us out. Had not Father Morice dwelt among 
these Indians for more than a dozen years, and did he 
not think in the aboriginal speech, and ' speak Carrier 
more fluently than English, or even my native French,' 
we should be astounded when he declares that 'a child 
four or five years old possesses these innumerable vocables 
well nigh as perfectly as does his father, and knows his 
intricate language infinitely better than any French acade- 
mician does his own plain and easy mother-tongue' (437, 
pp. 178-181). A study of the 'contents of the minds of 
Dene children would certainly reveal much of interest to 
the psychologist.' 

Professor A. Budilowski, after a careful investigation 
of the Slavonic speech in its historical development, attri- 
butes to the 'primitive Slavonic' 575 root-ideas, distributed 
thus : — Cosmography, meteorology, physics, geography, 102 ; 
mineralogy, 19; botany, 185; zoology, 137; anatomy and 
physiology of animals, 90; medicine, 32.^ Souche's col- 
1 Arch./. Anthr., XH. 396. 



l66 THE CHILD 

lection of French proverbs, popular sayings, etc., contains 
638 sayings, of which 238 refer to animals, 49 to plants, 
209 to man, 41 to agriculture, weather, etc., and 41 to 
health. We are without corresponding collections for 
many primitive peoples, but they scarcely suffer in the com- 
parison, judged by the volumes of African Negro, Malay 
and Dravidian lore already published. Mrs Bergen's valu- 
able books on Popular Superstitions^ and Ajiimal and 
Plant Lore, show the extent to which the child of European 
ancestry has, in America, made himself familiar with many 
things in nature, as the Red Indian did before him. The 
vocabulary he makes himself in this communion with 
nature often surprises parents and teachers, who find his 
control of words otherwise so small, and his knowledge of 
other things like it. 

Child as Laiigiiage Learjier. — The chief points emphasised 
by Egger in his study of the development of intelligence and 
language in the child are : — i. The child in the bosom of its 
mother has only a borrowed life ; he takes possession of new 
life by acts which reveal the animal. 2. The dawn of real 
intelligence comes with laughter. 3. The teacherless child 
[in the beginning] learns quickest and best, memory and 
attention being more than reason. 4. The child's acquisition 
of our language means the unlearning of his own. 5. Chil- 
dren understand much before they speak little, or at all. 
6. Children are very faithful to the music of language, respect- 
ing the rule of accent more than any other. 7. The mind is 
the thing in the child. 8. When we call the child a little 
man we are right, for life is complete at this early age, neither 
adolescence nor maturity bringing anything essential to its 
nature, nor introducing into its reason any new principle, 
into its intelligence any new faculty. Age does nothing but 
develop the pre-existing forces of the mind. There are many 
interesting truths in this outline, although the author goes out 
of his way somewhat to call the child ' a little man,' to whom 
nothing essential is afterwards added. One can often agree 
with Egger because he saw so much of the real development 
of the child. The fact that the child in learning our language 
unlearns his own, is of great importance. In a certain sense 
one might generalise and say that language in the child, as a 
living and lasting thing, is ' born of imitation,' and just as the 
child seems prone to choose a profession below that of his 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD \6j 

parents, when inquiry as to his early choice is made his 
language bears the same stamp of inferiority. The social 
factor, after all, is perhaps the one most powerful, alike in 
repressing the child's animality of speech, and in furthering 
his humanity of language. 

But not all the child's original language perishes utterly even 
with us. It is worth noting that many of the innovations and 
changes which make themselves felt in the living languages 
to-day, have, as of old, the child-mark upon them — those 
things against which the ' purists ' rage in vain, and of which 
excellent examples may be found in Emile Deschamel's 
'Deformations of French,' and Theodor Mathias's 'Speech- 
life and Speech-faults.' The child's predilection for slang 
and linguistic 'short-cuts' is in a way justified by the history 
of the race. 

From what has gone before, one can see how far right and 
how far wrong is Dr Hermann Gutzmann in the parallel he 
seeks to establish between the speech of children and the 
languages of primitive peoples. This parallel is, in brief, as 
follows (261) : — 

A. Phonetic : i. Reduplication. 2. Early use of nasals by 
children, and their very common preference by certain savage 
peoples. 3. Use at first of explosives for fricatives, as with 
primitive peoples. 4. Late appearance of the sibilants of the 
second articulation-system, and their absence in many savage 
languages {e.g.^ certain Polynesian tongues). 5. Use and 
substitution of /and r. 6. Interchange of k and /. 7. Early 
occurrence of ' clicks,' and their appearance in certain primi- 
tive tongues. 

B. Speech-form and speech-content : i. Limited vocabu- 
lary, making necessary the aid of gesture and pantomime. 
2. Method of narration, with its predilection for minutiae and 
incidentals (the child here closely resembles the negro and the 
Bakairi of Brazil). 3. Counting. 4. The possession, at first, 
of only designations for individual objects, and the lack, or 
rare occurrence, of collective names. 9. Drawing. 

Some interesting points remain to be discussed concerning 
oral and written speech. 

Written Language, — Drawing is only a primitive way of 
writing, and might naturally be supposed to be related in its 
development to the evolution of speech in the child. The 
parallelism in the stages of development of language and 



1 68 



THE CHILD 



drawing is indicated in the following table compiled by Dr 
Lukens (378, p. 86) : — 



Development of Drawing. 


Stage. 


Development of Speech. 


Automatic and aimless scribble. 


I. 


Automatic cries and reflex or 
impulsive sounds. 


Scribbling localisations and 


H. 


Imitation of sound, but with- 


imitations of movements of 




out meaning ; child babbles 


other persons' hands. 




back when addressed. 


Understands pictures, but does 


HI. 


Understands words, but does 


not yet draw beyond the 




not yet speak beyond such 


simplest localisation of 




words as ' mamma, ' ' papa,' 


features by scribbling. 




' no,' etc. 


CojDies from others to see how 


IV. 


Repeats words as mere sounds 


to get the right effect in the 




when they are said to him. 


use of lines. 




(Brief stage and of httle 
importance. ) 


Picture - writing, illustrated 


V. 


Uses words to express his 


stories, scenes, etc. 




thoughts. 


Studies technique of drawing — 


VI. 


Studies grammar. and rhetoric. 


perspective, proportion, shad- 






ing, etc. 







Dr P. Marie, in his psychiatrical study of the evolution of 
language, emphasises the fact that, while the oral forms of 
speech ' enjoyed a pre-formed centre in the brain, the written 
forms had to be content with an adapted one ' — there being no 
real separate centre in the brain for written as contrasted 
with spoken language, much less each modality of language. 
Written language naturally follows and is prepared for by 
spoken language in the history of the individual, as also in 
that of the race (400). 

Reading and Writing. — Professor G. T. W. Patrick, of the 
University of Iowa, arguing upon neurological, psychological 
and anthropological grounds, protests against the 'worship of 
the reading-book, spelling-book, copy-book and dictionary,' 
now so prevalent in the primary schools, with their favour- 
ing of lax methods of study, weakening of memory and 
retentive power (475, p. 361). He advises, therefore, the 
postponement of the teaching of reading and writing in 
the schools until after the child is ten years of age. The 
child ought to follow the race - history ; man has only 
recently become a reading and a writing animal, and still 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD 169 

feels the strain of his adaptation. The child at the age in 
question is no more mature than the race was when the accom- 
modation to reading and writing began, and naturally rebels 
somewhat at the sedentary habits, manual dexterity, finely co- 
ordinated movements, lessened memory, increased subjectivity, 
reflection, deliberation, reason, etc., of the school and civiHsed 
life. To cite Patrick's own summary : ' It will demand a con- 
siderable maturity in the child before he is ready for that 
which has developed so late in the history of the race. The 
language of the child, like that of the primitive man, is the 
language of the ear and tongue. The child is a talking and 
hearing animal. He is ear-minded. There has been in the 
history of civilisation a steady development toward the prepon- 
derating use of the higher senses, culminating with the eye. 
The average adult civilised man is now strongly eye-minded, 
but it is necessary to go back only to the time of the ancient 
Greeks to fiind a decidedly relative ear-mindedness. Few 
laboratory researches have been made upon the relative 
rapidity of development of the special senses in children, 
but such as have been made tend to confirm the indications 
of the "culture-epochs" theory, and to show that the auditory 
centres develop earlier than the visual.' 

Moreover, the period from seven to eleven years is that 
in which the child may with most economy ' gain a lasting 
knowledge of a foreign language.' Mr Street, in his discussion 
of 'Language Teaching' (618, p. 289), emphasises this point 
also, when , he observes : ' By the time the child is ten ' 
[having begun about 5-7] ' he will have a sufficient grasp of 
one foreign tongue to permit the introduction of a second.' 
Patrick's contention that several languages may be learned 
orally by the child before he is set to read or write his own 
or any tongue gains some support from the race analogy. 
Polyglot speakers are very common indeed among primitive 
peoples. To bind the child too early to the restraints com- 
pelled by writing especially is to diminish unduly the great 
and useful role played in the normal life of the child by talking, 
shouting, singing, laughing, crying, and even sighing and yawn- 
ing, which are all, as Dr Harry Campbell has pointed out, aids 
to health and well-being of the highest importance. The too 
frequent repression of physiological exertions, such as most of 
these phenomena usually are, involving respiratory exercise, 
blood-circulation, rhythmic compression and dilation of the 



170 THE CHILD 

pelvic viscera, etc., — which carry with them expenditures of 
neuro-muscular energy and induce psychic phenomena, which, 
in their turn, have their physiological accompaniments, — causes 
the child to suffer as much as would the savage who is similarly 
given to these natural vents of feeling and emotion. The child 
ought to talk much and talk well before he is forced to write — 
so often to write only badly. 

Talking has always been one of the most healthy and bene- 
ficial human exercises, and in vocal utterances as compared with 
writing there -is more play of the physical effects of thought (as 
Dr Harry Campbell has observed), and modifications of voice 
and gesture are almost infinite. Talking, indeed, makes up in 
great part for lack of physical exercise, and not a little of 
woman's health in all lands and in all ages is owing to the fact 
that, especially among primitive peoples, she is the linguist, the 
constant talker, if not the omtor J>ar excellence. It is also one 
of the greatest defences of childhood. Dr Campbell does not 
hesitate to say that the stimulative effect of ' animated con- 
versation,' and the exercise of talking as an art, enables lawyers, 
ministers, teachers, statesmen, etc., to get along without the 
gymnasium and the other artificial stimuli of the present day, 
and that, moreover, talking is distinctly favourable to longevity, 
beneficial in cases of heart disease, and only really exhaustive 
and dangerous in those nervously run down. 

Shouting, Dr Campbell tells us, favours the development 
of the lungs, accelerating the circulation of the blood and in- 
creasing the depth of the respiratory movements. Shouting 
and gesticulation (Hughlings Jackson would add even swearing) 
have often markedly beneficial physiological effects ; the ' out- 
breaks of irritability in disease (gout, etc.) ' are by no means 
always pathological in their effects, while it is a well-known 
fact that in children (and often adults as well) ' passionate out- 
bursts are generally succeeded by periods of good behaviour, 
and, it may be, improved health.' As a pain-reliever the shriek, 
the groan, have been known since the birth of man. As Dr 
Campbell remarks, the varieties of the shout and the shriek 
are legion, and 'the shout of the child at play, the hurrahs 
of applauding multitudes, the cry of the huntsman, the war- 
whoop of the savage, the yells of an attacking force,' etc., 
may all dull sensibility or produce a state bordering upon 
ecstasy. And the child ought to have the full benefit of what 
is good in all this at the most natural time. 



THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD 171 

Some valuable suggestions are contained in Professor O. T. 
Mason's brief article on the ' Comparison of Written Language 
with that which is Spoken only ' (415, p. 139). In oral speech 
the speaker is creator and destroyer, the hearer, preserver ; and 
spoken language at any time is the resultant of the centrifugal 
force of speaking, which initiates changes and alterations, and 
the centripetal force of hearing, which makes for conserva- 
tism — the desire to speak at will, the wish to be understood. 
Spoken language is ear-controlled, written language eye-con- 
trolled. In spoken language memory and its resources hold 
the combinations of roots or fundamental forms that are neces- 
sary for the expression of the variety of ideas and thoughts 
possessed by a people in savagery or barbarism; written 
language is the subsidising of memory — ' the product, the 
receptacle and the instrument of thought, just as a vase is the 
product of the art of pottery, the receptable of the art of 
husbandry, and an instrument in the art of cookery.' 




DRAWING OF HEN BY SIX-YEAR-OLD CHILD. 




DRAWING OF GROUSE BY KOOTENAY INDIAN. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE ARTS OF CHILDHOOD 

According to Miss Paola Lombroso (369, p. 137), there exists 
'an interesting parallel, or analogy, between the way in which 
the child begins to speak and to discourse, and the way in 
which he begins to compose and write.' When he is begin- 
ning to speak the child ' expresses himself in mere sketches of 
ideas, truncated simple propositions,' succeeding only by slow 
degrees in expressing himself clearly and correctly ; and when 
(at five or six years of age) he begins to compose and to write, 
he has to re-traverse the same road by the same stages. The 
themes and school-writings of young children abundantly prove 
this. As the same author says (369, p. 138) : 'A child of six 
years, who already will make viva voce observations and state- 
ments of great skill, feels the need of mincing in detail the 
impressions which he has to express in writing, of simplifying 
them by repetition and detail.' There does not seem, in fact, 
to exist any correspondence between the intellectual manifesta- 
tions of children at the age of from five to seven years and 
their writings at the same period of life ; the child who speaks 
correctly enough stumbles and hesitates when he comes to 
write. As Miss Lombroso remarks : ' Just as in the early times 
of speech, when the child thought of the word boat, he had in 
mind some particular boat, so, when he comes to write a letter, 
he has in mind some letter written by the teacher, and it is a 
long time before he comes to write a letter automatically.' 
Moreover, 'just as the child at first in speaking resorts to 
gesture, and tries only to express simple ideas with concrete 
words (nouns, adjective, verbs, — only gradually introducing 
adverbs, articles, copulas, etc.), so also in beginning to write 
he expresses simple relations and schematic observations.' 
The difficulties in the way of learning to set one's thoughts 
down in writing emphasise the position taken by Professor 

173 



174 THE CHILD 

Patrick, which seems also to be supported by Mosso, the great 
Italian physiologist. 

Origm of Mil sic. — From language to music is hardly even 
a step, if we accept the theories of some authorities. Wallas- 
chek, following Galton's and Weismann's theory of the non- 
heredity of acquired variations, seeks to ' explain the progress 
in music ' [e.g., the rapid progress during the present century, 
especially during the last thirty years] ' by tradition and imita- 
tion,' its origin and development, as a necessary incident of 
savage and barbarous life, having been due to natural selection 
— the musical faculty serving to organise the masses and facih- 
tate association in acting. The play in peace-time turns readily 
to useful ability in times of need or war (674, p. 294). Music, 
like moral development, the instincts of birds, etc., is perpetu- 
ated and improved by tradition and imitation — in accordance 
with the principle of 'objective heredity,' as Wallaschek terms 
it, by which, e.g., ' every progression in music is at once imitated 
and preserved objectively for later generations' (674, p. 269); 
Wallaschek finds the ultimate origin of music in the 'rhyth- 
mical impulse in man' — musical effects, however, not consist- 
ing in rhythmical movement /(?r se, for 'innumerable ideas and 
feelings become associated with it, and give rise to those 
emotions which we on hearing it experience.' The sense of 
rhythm arises ' from the general appetite for exercise,' a desire 
whose ' rhythmical form is due to sociological as well as psycho- 
logical conditions.' That music grew out of speech (as Darwin 
and Spencer have maintained) Wallaschek does not believe, 
and he also rejects the view of the origin of music which sees 
its rise in the bird's song of love (a device to charm the opposite 
sex), which reaches its acme in man. Some facts brought out 
by Hudson and other naturalists are held to weaken the bird 
love-song theory, which makes music the product of sexual 
selection. If music be related to speech as drawing to writing, 
the problem of its origin and development needs much further 
study and investigation. Its growth, certainly, has not been 
synchronous and co-equal with that of language. 

Music with the Savage and the Child. — Music, according to 
Major J. W. Powell, whose presidential address before the 
American Association at Toronto, in 1889, was devoted to 
the consideration of the ' Evolution of Music from Dance to 
Symphony,' has only in the course of long ages come to be 
'the language of the emotions kindled by the glories of the 



THE ARTS OF CHILDHOOD 1 75 

Very late, with the slow growth of culture and 
human reason, have appreciation of the beauties of nature and 
its expression in music come to be. Of the pains and 
pleasures, the joys and sorrows of mankind, and not of the 
music of nature was the art of music born. Its first origins 
are lost in the mist of prehistoric times. Out of the dance, 
the earliest known aesthetic art, sprang music, and the dance 
'has its foundation in the physical constitution of man; it is 
the expression of the joy of animal life.' From the dance, the 
art of the rhythm of mere existence, to music, the art of the 
rhythm of living in the highest human sense, is a long road. 
The stages in the growth of music in the race at large, and 
they are the same in the growth of the individual, have. Major 
Powell says, been four, 'music as rhythm, music as melody, 
music as harmony, music as symphony ' ; music has developed 
from the emotional nature of man, as philosophy has from his 
intellectual nature. The origin of these four stages is thus 
explained : ' Rhythm was born of the dance, melody was born 
of poetry, harmony was born of drama, symphony was born of 
science. The motive of rhythmic music was biotic exaltation ; 
the motive of melody was social exaltation ; the motive of 
harmony was religious exaltation ; the motive of symphony is 
aesthetic exaltation.' Music began with the activity innate in 
man — 'when the rhythm of motion became the rhythm of 
emotion.' Both the beginnings of music and of musical instru- 
ments are bound up with the dance. The dances of the 
savage world (sylvan rather than savage. Major Powell writes), 
merry, hearty, rollicking and joyous, find their modern repre- 
sentatives in the ring-games and other plays of children 
recorded by Mr Newell and Mrs Gomme : ' Blue-eyed children 
play with the brown-eyed, and brown-eyed children play with 
the black-eyed, and then all join hands and play "ring-around- 
(' a-rosy " ; and out of this childish sport, by minute increments, 
musical rhythm becomes.' And the dance made primitive men 
one as it now makes children one. 

By-and-by, as we see again from the games of the children 
of to-day, the expression of the emotions in the dance rises to 
the dignity of speech : ' The leader repeats the words and the 
people chant the refrain, and more and more he gains a freedom 
in composition, and he varies his chant with new sentences, 
iterating and reiterating the emotional theme. In this way 
poetry becomes, and we have dancing-master poets and dance 



1/6 THE CHILD 

songs. As the dancing-master poet varies his theme of poetry 
so he varies his theme of music, and melody becomes. Poetry 
and melody are twins born of the dancing chant. Thus it is 
that " ring-around-a-rosy " becomes a song.' 

The nonsense-words, unmeaning syllables and uncouth 
sentences of our children's game-songs find their parallels in 
the same phenomena of savagery, and tell of the ages that 
passed before music and poetry came really ' to live together,' 
before the song which ' expressed the joy of exuberant emotion,' 
was rightly married to the dance which ' expressed the joy of 
exuberant life/. 

As men rise from savagery through barbarism, poetry is 
more and more released from Terpsichorean feet, and soars 
into the realm of ideal emotion. Now men, women, children, 
sing as they labour : ' Priests sing as they perform religious 
rites, women sing as they grind at the mill, children sing at 
their sports.' 

Harmony, too, gradually develops out of the grouping of 
voices in folk-singing : ' The notes of man are low and re- 
sonant like the voices of waves and winds; the notes of women 
are high and clear like the voices of birds ; while children pipe 
like bees.' In savagery, also, Major Powell tells us, the drama 
begins, and to suit the actors harmonious parts are developed 
in the singing, — for the drama is only the story of creation 
sung, — and full-fledged harmony ultimately appears. Again, 
the song-games of children recall the dramatised myths of 
the primitive peoples of all lands. Music has now become, 
with innumerable variations, both profane and sacred, and runs 
the gamut of all human feelings and emotions. 

^ At last science comes and gives music 'a multitude of 
sweet instruments ' and power, ' kindled by the higher intel- 
lectual faculties,' to appreciate all that is good, beautiful and 
true in Nature and in Nature's work, in man and in the works 
and thoughts, the dreams and ideals of man. Now 'the 
"ring-around-a-rosy" has become a symphony,' its accompani- 
ment a subhme poem. 

_. The child, dancing with delight when he receives a present, 
or whistling to keep his courage up as he goes through a dark 
forest, or along a gloomy lane, represents that age of the race 
when ' they danced to their gods, and beat their drums to their 
gods, and played their whistles to their gods, and blew their 
horns to their gods, until the winds stilled, and the storms 



THE ARTS OF CHILDHOOD 1 77 

abated, and the lightnings went out, and the thunders hushed, 
and the floods ran away to the sea, and then they rejoiced with 
flashing and dancing and music' 

^ The boy of to-day with his noisy ' bull-roarer ' is the time- 
softened embodiment of our ancestors in the days when 'a 
group of naked, savage warriors, intent on plunder, rapine, and 
the midnight murder of men, women and children, gather 
about the camp-fire in the weird dance, and leap and howl and 
whip their bull-roarer until they work themselves into a state of 
fury.' The children, whistling or singing to dull the toothache, 
or chanting in chorus to drown the cries or alleviate the pain of 
a companion, take us back to the time when men ' by shrill 
shrieks, by mad howling and by horrid imprecation ' sought to 
drive away the disease - producing spirits, or by the dance, 
music and the chant 'called for the beneficent spirits.' They 
take us back to the time of which it may be said : Dance and 
music are the quinine and calomel of the savage — the ' water 
cure,' the 'faith cure,' the 'blue glass cure,' the 'mind cure,' 
the 'Christian science cure,' the 'youth-restoring elixir,' the 
'panacea for all human ills.' 

When to-day the ring of children dances around a comrade 
who has been hurt, or who does not feel well, they are exercis- 
ing the therapeutic art of music known to every primitive race 
and praised in the annals of medicine from JEsculapius to 
Dr Maillet (197, p. 339)- The old incantation and drum-beat- 
ing have not yet lost their strength altogether, the ' charm ' of 
music still seems to soothe (as well as to excite) and to cure 
others than the child and the savage. Concerning this much 
may be read in the book of Honnet, pubHshed in 1874, on the 
Effects a?id Influence of Music m Health and in Disease^ and 
many subsequent articles and essays. 

Effects of Music. — Some of the more recent literature on 
the faculty of music and its pathology has been well summarised 
by Ur G. C. Ferrari (197), while to the same investigator, 
together with Dr C. Bernardini (50), we owe some interesting 
experiments on the musical memory of idiots. 

Sollier, in his work on the psychology of the idiot and the 
imbecile, mentions the curious fact that ' a liking for music is 
the only artistic trait' that these true proletarians of intelli- 
gence,' as Ferrari terms them, possess ; and he attributes it to 
the ' sensual ' character of music. Twenty years before, Hugh- 
lings-Jackson had observed that 'idiotic children, who were 

M 



178 THE CHILD 

not mutes, could pronounce singing a larger number of words 
than they were generally able to do speaking,' and in 1890 
Knoblauch pointed out that 'aphasic subjects' (not idiotic) 
were, under the excitement of music, able to pronounce words 
which they were absolutely unable to utter without such 
stimulus' (197, p. 316). 

Experiment on a large scale began in 1889 with Wilder- 
muth, who investigated the musical sense of 180 idiots (and 
imbeciles) and 82 normal children (boys). Ranking his 
subjects in four classes from, those having 'a good musical 
disposition ' to those characterised by ' musical incapacity,' 
he found the proportions from good to bad as follows : 
Idiots, 27 per cent., 36 per cent., 26 per cent., 11 per cent.; 
normal children, 60 per cent,, 27 per cent., 11 per cent., 
2 per cent. In other words, a large proportion (nearly one- 
third) of the idiots possessed 'a good disposition for music,' 
and only 11 per cent, (as compared with 2 per cent, of the 
normals) were absolutely without musical ability. Moreover, 
as Ferrari remarks, the normal children were taken from 
a country (Germany) whose inhabitants have generally a good 
musical ear, and the majority of them, unHke the idiots, 
had received a certain measure of systematical musical 
instruction. 

N Ireland, 1 in his study of the musical faculty in cerebral 
diseases, found that idiots, as a rule, like to listen to music, 
and, moreover, that even mute idiots sometimes give forth 
musical motives, while idiots belonging to famiUes of which 
many members have musical dispositions, share in the passion 
for music. Dr Ireland's statement that in mental disease the 
musical faculties are the last to disappear, is, as Ferrari points 
out (197, p. 336), contradicted by the results of Dr Legge, 
who shows that the musical faculty in dements disappears 
with the other sesthetic sentiments before the complete 
diminution of the mental powers. Dr Legge's researches 
were published in 1894,^ and dealt with the musical faculty 
of 50 idiots. Of these 30 took some interest in hearing music, 
while 20 showed themselves altogether indifferent; 15 could 
repeat certain tones without words, and 9 repeated them with 
words. We are told further that 5 could articulate words 
well, but did not at all comprehend them, while i was a deaf 

'^ Journ. Ment. Sci., 1894. "^ Jotini. Ment. Sci., p, 373. 



THE ARTS OF CHILDHOOD I79 

mute. This last once repeated a note made by one of his 
companions, and, although in the lowest depths of idiocy, he 
seemed to take pleasure in hearing music, whilst preserving an 
utter indifference to the noise going on about him. 

The experiments of Bernardini and Ferrari on the memory 
for music (notes and phrases sung to the subject early in the 
morning almost immediately after the first meal) of idiots 
were carried out on two occasions (20-30 days apart) upon 
60 males and 40 females in the Psychiatric Institute of 
Reggio, Italy. The general results were as follows (50, 
p. 320): (i) Possessing a marked musical sensibility, 12 per 
cent. (7 males, 5 females). (2) Those who, perhaps, felt 
music, and eventually evince a certain degree of musical 
memory, but localised arbitrarily, and almost never retained, 
20 per cent. (11 males and 9 females). (3) Negative: 
{a) voluntarily negative, 14 per cent. (7 males, 7 females) ; 
ip) negative through incapacity or lack of attention, 30 per 
cent. (22 males, 8 females); {c) able to repeat the rhythm 
only, g per cent. (3 males, 6 females) ; (d) able to repeat some 
note beside the rhythm, 7 per cent. (7 males). 

Of 8 mutes, the authors say that, contrary to the results of 
Ireland, all efforts to discern their sensibility to the sounds of 
the pianoforte were unsuccessful. 

Newington explains the liking of ' idiots and others of low 
intellectual development' for music as 'a ready means of 
gratification of the pleasure sense which the idiot retains ' — 
a sense-gratification, the essence of which lies in motion.^ 

Both with normal men and animals there appear to be 
considerable individual differences in the psychic and 
emotional effects of music. This is clearly shown by the 
experiments of Oilman and Downey. 

Some curious information as to the effects of music upon 
men of science and litterateurs has been collected by Dory 
and Ehrenfreund. From their investigations we learn that 
even in Italy, the land of music par excelleitce in many 
respects, not a few men of science and of letters neither play 
any musical instrument nor are sensitive to anything beyond 
an admiration for music. Schiaparelli, the astronomer, and 
Mantegazza, the physiologist and anthropologist, seem to 
figure in this list. The latter ' adores music,' but cannot tell 
'^Journ. Meiit. Sci., 1897, p. 717. 



l8o THE CHILD 

a waltz from a polka, and prefers the human voice to all 
instruments. Mantegazza, however, says that music serves 
him as an inspiration to write and think. This last effect of 
music is quite common with non-musical people. Indeed, the 
well-known stimulating effect of music upon physical labour 
would suggest something similar in the mental field. The 
effect of music upon mental labour offers an opportunity for 
research of a thoroughgoing kind, for although Honnet and 
others, Biicher, Noire, etc., have touched upon the topic, 
many points yet remain to be brought out. 

Primitive Music. — The best work on Primitive Music is 
Wallaschek's exhaustive essay, in which the origin and 
development of the music, songs, instruments, dances and 
pantomimes of savage races are sympathetically treated. 
Music, like speech, seems to be the patrimony of all man- 
kind : ' However far we might descend in the order of 
primitive people we should probably find no race which did 
not exhibit at least some trace of musical aptitude, and 
sufficient understanding to turn it to account. In fact, it 
would appear that among races of the very lowest order of 
civilisation there are frequently to be found some which have 
more musical capacity than many of a higher order. This is 
undoubtedly the case with the Bushmen' (674, p. i). 

In his discussion of the origin and development of musical 
instruments Wallaschek rejects the theory that the oldest 
instrument is the drum, while all stringed instruments are of 
_the most recent origin. The oldest instrument, he. thinks, is 
Jhe flute (and the pipe), while the stringed bow, a very simple 
instrument, long preceded the drum. As even our modern 
phenomena show, the drum is an instrument needing co-opera- 
tion for its production, but the boy does as the race has done, 
'cuts his flute in a few moments,' or makes his primitive 
harp sometimes as readily. Utterly unjustifiable, ¥/allaschek 
thinks, is Rowbotham's theory of the drum, pipe and lyre 
stages of musical development, corresponding to the stone, 
bronze and iron ages. Drumming may have been 'the first 
attempt at the practice of music, or rather of time-keeping, 
but the drum was by no means the first instrument.' Many 
primitive tribes, possessed of songs and dances, use no real 
musical instruments at all, ' anything making a noise ' being 
used to accompany the performers — just as our children are 
wont to do to-day. The appreciation of European instruments 



THE ARTS OF CHILDHOOD l8l 

of music in savage countries is often very different from what 
it is in civilised lands : the Austrahans were frightened by the 
Scotch bagpipe; in Tonga, French horns were particularly 
despised; the Fuegians were unimpressed by the flute. 
There is great variety also in the effect of European singing 
upon savage auditors : ' God Save the Queen ' set an 
Australian to weeping ; the ' Marseillaise ' sent an Australian 
family into whimsical contortions and gestures of wild 
enthusiasm, causing them even to forget their meal. 

Among many primitive peoples music is much more 
common and varied in psychical motive than is generally 
supposed. What Sir George Grey, as cited in Wallaschek 
(674, p. 164), says of the natives of Australia will hold of not 
a few other primitive peoples as well : ' To a sulky old native, 
his song is what a quid of tobacco is to a sailor ; if he is angry 
he sings ; if he is glad he sings ; if hungry, he sings ; if full, 
provided he is not so full as to be in a state of stupor, he 
sings more lustily than ever.' Primitive peoples 'are highly 
susceptible to music ' — both as a stimulus to excitement and 
a means of solace and cure in illness. Wallaschek also 
informs us that 'in some cases music causes physical pain, 
and makes men sick and unfitted for work for days together.' 

Music, Da?ice and Sojtg. — Among other points brought out 
by Wallaschek are these : Dance and music go together ('are, 
in fact, one act of expression, not merely an occasional union, 
like poetry and music '). And ' women are the most persistent 
dancers, and, as they are the better singers as well, primitive 
music owes its support to a great extent to women.' Dances 
are imitations of the ' movements necessary in the struggle for 
existence,' or of the movements of animals. The musical 
dance-chorus is of a social character; of like origin is the 
orchestra, really a very primitive institution. In the primitive 
drama, pantomime, opera, the social (even national) expression 
of music reaches its highest point — inter carniiita silent arma. 
Professional composers and singers are known from very early 
times and among the most primitive races, and their power in 
pohtics has at times been considerable. Primitive races know 
both the major and the minor key ; harmony and part-singing ; 
diatonic and pentatonic scales. The human voice has not been 
higher in early times, ' the high pitch being merely due to the 
great excitement with which savages sing.' 

What Sir George Grey said of the Australian ought to be 



182 THE CHILD 

read in connection with what Miss AHce C. Fletcher, in her 
excellent 'Study of Omaha Indian Music' (214), says of the 
American Indian : ''Among the Indians m.usic envelops like 
an atmosphere every religious tribal and social ceremony, as 
well as every personal experience. There is not a phase of 
life that does not find expression in song. Religious rituals 
are embodied in it ; the reverend recognition of the creation 
of the corn, of the food-giving animals, of the powers of the 
air, of the fructifying sun, is passed from one generation to 
another in melodious measures ; song nerves the warrior to 
deeds of heroism and robs death of its terrors ; it speeds the 
spirit to the land of the hereafter, and solaces those who live 
to mourn ; children compose ditties for their games, and young 
men by music give zest to their sports ; the lover sings his way 
to the maiden's heart, and the old man tunefully invokes those 
agencies which can avert death. Music is also the medium 
through which man holds communion with his soul, and with 
the unseen powers which control his destiny.' 

This statement is confirmed by Dr Franz Boas ^ who disposes 
of ' the often-repeated statement that the Indian has no sense 
for music, and that particularly as compared to the negro, he is 
entirely lacking in musical genius,' though it is true his efforts 
have been devoted more to the production of songs than to 
the invention of musical instruments. 

Miss Fletcher's estimate of the role of music among the 
Omaha Indians seems to emphasise what Wallaschek says 
about its importance among primitive peoples : ' Primitive 
music is not at all an abstract art, but (taken in connection 
with dance and pantomime) is a part of the necessaries of life 
(war and hunting), for which it seems to prepare or to maintain 
our strength and skill during time of peace' (674, p. 294). 

In many respects, music may be said to be just as 
important in childhood. 

Children and Music. — A very interesting essay by Miss 
Fanny B. Gates contains the results of an examination of the 
answer-papers of some 2000 school-children of New England 
(100 boys and 100 girls of each age, from seven to sixteen 
inclusive) as to their musical interests, favourite songs, etc. 
The author finds that the elements of greatest importance in 
the musical development of the child are, 'rhythm, love of 
'^ Jonrn, Anier. Folk- Lore, VII. 170. 



THE ARTS OF CHILDHOOD 183 

home, love of country, melody, religious sentiment. The 
same quahties appear in the musical development of savage 
tribes' (238, p. 19). Miss Gates cites with approval the 
words of Jean Paul : (^lusic, the only fine art in which 
man and all classes of animals, spiders, mice, elephants, fish, 
amphibious creatures, birds, have a community of goods, must 
ceaselessly affect the child who is the spiritual and the brute 
beast united,' and thinks that in the growth of music we see 
the child repeat the history of the race. 

This author seems to agree with Dr Reissmann and other 
German authorities, and President Hall, that mood, season, 
and other factors in the make-up of the child should be taken 
into consideration, as they have been evidently in the history 
of the race. Primitive peoples do not wihingly sing love-songs 
out of place, spring-songs in the fall, war-songs in times of 
profound peace, or satires at their most solemn meetings. Nor 
should children thus digress from the right way. 

I All investigations of the phenomena of music and song 
among children seem to indicate that folk-songs and the 
cultivation of music by ear come first, not the artificialities and 
notations of the school. Song should be free and fitted to the 
child mind. 

Primitive y^sthetics. — The universality of a very primitive 
sort of aesthetics is thus described by Mr J. D. McGuire, who 
sees in the child the type of it all (388, p. 671) : 'iThe writer 
imagines that the same feeling which impels a small child to 
pick up a smooth pebble on the beach has something to do 
with the fondness of adults, either savage or civihsed, for 
similar things. To the savage a bear's claw, an elk's tooth, 
or the talons of an eagle, are evidences of skill expended or 
bravery shown. The civilised man may preserve the shell, as 
he certainly does the pearl or the gold nugget set to adorn his 
person. The differences in society establish the values of 
jewellery, and the scarcity of an object makes it as attractive 
to the one race as to the other. Throughout all periods and 
conditions man appears to have entertained a lively apprecia- 
tion of the colours of the rainbow, the gay plumage of a 
beautiful bird, the grace of the cat tribe, the viciousness of the 
wolves, and the beautiful lines in nature. There is in the 
human being an instinctive appreciation of beauty and fitness 
which is not shared by any of the animals. Fashions change 
continually, and there are many instances of an article ' [the 



1 84 THE CHILD 

ancient bronze fibula and the modern safety pin, for example], 
' common at one period, but subsequently quite forgotten be- 
cause of its disuse, which after a lapse of ages has again ap- 
peared, possibly as the result of an independent discovery.' 
So far the anthropologist. Somewhat similar are the views of 
many modern psychologists. Professor H. R. Marshall (408, 
p. loi), who holds that the 'art impulse' is a 'blind impulse 
leading men to create with little or no notion of the end they 
have in view,' thinks that this impulse, so wonderful in some 
of its genial developments, 'is, in one form or another, a 
common heritage for all members of our race.' As Professor 
Marshall further says : ' What child, what savage does not 
show some tendency to use his surplus vigour in crude attempts 
to produce works, which, in their developed form, give us 
our best art products ? Almost every adult feels some tendency 
to write verses or to compose melodies, or to dabble with the 
brush and palette, or to represent his thoughts with the 
draughtsman's pencil.' 

The spontaneity of art is greater than age, or sex or race, 
but its expression is diversely controlled by these and other 
factors of human individual and social development much 
more than its origin. 

To some of the most primitive races of men, the rude be- 
ginnings of the education we seek to convey at the present 
time by means of picture galleries, art museums, photographic 
and stereopticon exhibitions, came through their implements 
and weapons, which were often travelling museums and 
libraries as well. 

Of the ornamentation upon the drill-bows, a characteristic 
instrument of the Eskimo, Mr J. D. McGuire writes (388, p. 
720): 'The ornamentation upon the ivory drill-bows is ex- 
tremely varied in its range, from mere scratches or notches 
made in the ivory to ornamented carving and etching. These 
designs, etchings and carvings appear to constitute quite an ela- 
borate aboriginal school of art. At one place we encounter bows 
covered with Hnes, circles, angles or curves, drawn with pre- 
cision and elaborated carefully. In another place we see 
animal life portrayed with remarkable fidelity to nature ; hunt- 
ing and trapping scenes are delineated with minute precision, 
and caricatures of daily life are often portrayed with no mean 
artistic ability. These drawings often show a keen appreciation 
of the ludicrous, ^ 



THE ARTS OF CHILDHOOD 1 85 

{These drill-bows have on them pictures of youth and old 
age ; and from the frequent occurrence of dances and games 
etched into the ivory, we can see at a glance that these hyper- 
boreans enjoyed at times pleasures with which their lives are 
not generally supposed to be associated. On these bows are 
seen whales floating, diving and spouting, as well as the dead 
animal being dragged to the ice. Seal and walrus hunting 
scenes are well shown. Porpoise in schools ; ducks flying in 
bunches ; deer feeding and running ; the setting of traps, and 
the animals caught in them, are often seen, and no drawings 
appear more common than do those representing the dragging 
to shore, or to the ice, of captured game.' 

Indeed, it would be possible, from a study of drill-bow 
etchings, 'to understand the daily life of these people.' Here 
is a widespread source of education in art and the science of 
life, and we know, moreover, that with many peoples, minia- 
tures of these implements and instruments were made to serve 
as toys and playthings for their children. 

Or?im7ientation. — ^The mania for ornamentation,' says 
Mongeolle, ' is as old as humanity ' ; prehistoric man, as far 
back as we can trace him, knew somewhat of the art. The 
origin of ornament is to be sought in ^social ineaualit v.' and 
the ' democratic equality,' to which the world is tending, has 
been accompanied by a decrease in the 'orgie of ornament,' 
which has been parallel with the rise in culture and civilisation. 
In savage and barbarous races men and women have vied with 
one another in mutilating nose, lips, teeth, genitals, and other 
organs of the body, until these have come to resemble more 
the rudimentary and vestigial ancestors, or shrunken-up remains 
of the parts in question, rather than their full-functioning evolu- 
tionary equivalents. They have assumed the skin, the claws, 
the teeth, the face-mask of the fierce creatures they have slain, 
or the gentler ones they have tamed. And when man came to 
be the great enemy of man, and the struggle was between men 
and men, the star of the warrior rose as that of the woman 
fell. Tattooing, painting, scarifications, etc., simulated the 
enemy dead and gone, his blood, the wounds of battle. As 
man has formerly clothed himself in the wild beast he had 
slain, so in some fashion he did now with the man he had 
killed — the teeth, bone, fingers, skin of the fallen foe served 
him for ornament, as had done before the bones, teeth, claws 
of animals. When the metallic arts began to develop, imita- 



1 86 THE CHILD 



^, 



tions took the place of the older ornaments, and decoration 
became more and more symbolic ; the early appearance and 
evelopment of the seal-ring is a most interesting case in point. 
Woman is more given to ornament and decoration to-day than 
man, and the reason is that she has not yet emerged from age- 
long servitude?} Her abandonment of heavy earrings, anklets, 
rings, belts anci girdles, ear-piercing, foot-cramping, waist-com- 
pressing, has progressed with her increased freedom and liberty 
of action. Man, also, with the rise of social equality, has lost 
his heavy clothing, his ungainly head-dress, his clumsy boots j 
the soldier is no longer the museum of his wars, the nobleman 
no more the resume of his tyranny, the priest no longer the 
epitome of his theology — after six o'clock they are all equalised 
in the conventional 'dress suit.' It is a social rather than an 
aesthetic factor which has been most powerful in influencing 
to this end, says M. Mongeolle, and the law of the diminution 
of ornament meets us everywhere in the world where man has 
made progress at all. A most interesting paraUel is made by 
the author between man's abandonment of profuse decoration 
and his treatment of the products of his artistic genius : 'The 
idols left us by the least civilised peoples of antiquity are 
speckled from top to bottom, covered with the loudest colours, 
profusely laden with crowns, necklaces, bits of all sorts. In 
proportion as art progresses, the tone of the paintings softens, 
the polychroming is effaced, and the material chosen by pre- 
ference, white marble, is precisely that which takes on the most 
uniform tint — lastly, all the ornaments disappear. The Venus 
of Milo, the Venus Aphrodite, Diana hunting, and all the fine 
statues which adorn museums of antiquitieSj have on them no 
bracelets, rings, or jewels of any sort. The artist, in advance 
of his century, foreseeing, but without knowing its cause, this 
evolution of ornament, had divined the fact that the most 
beautiful ornament of woman is her own beauty' (432, p. 97). 
As Mr Bates points out, one very great factor in emancipating 
man from the hard-and-fast rule of the survival of the fittest 
was the development of the culinary art, since it ' reconciled 
the otherwise impossible co-existence of great assimilation with 
moderate assimilative organs and a free and active brain.' 
This early aesthetics of the stomach, if such it may be called, 
left the way open, among very primitive peoples, for the appear- 
ance of an aesthetics of the mind, and, a little later, a large 
development of the useful arts ; ' I mention the aesthetic arts 



THE ARTS OF CHILDHOOD 1 8/ 

first,' says Mr Bates again, 'for in all, except the arts of veriest 
necessity, they uniformly precede the industrial arts in the 
order of development. The coloured boy who "could do 
without shoes well enough, but was suffering for a breast-pin," 
was a rude but true type of the evolution of his race' .(41, 

\That many primitive peoples have a decided sense for the 
beauty and perfume of flowers, plants, and leaves is certain, 
and their poetry often abounds in picturesque and graceful 
metaphors and figures drawn from observation of plant life and 
development. The use of flowers and leaves for personal 
adornment is also common with several of the low-er races, 
those of the Pacific Islands especially. 

Dr Guppy writes of the natives of the Solomon Islands, a 
people credited often with great cruelty and cannibalistic 
practices (258, p. 134) : IThe men of the Solomon Islands 
are very fond of placing in their hair a brightly-coloured flower, 
such as that of Hibiscus tiliaceus, or a pretty sprig or the frond 
of a fern. My native companions in my excursions rarely 
passed a pretty flower without plucking it and placing it in 
their bushy hair; and they were fond of decorating my helmet 
in a similar fashion. Sometimes one individual would adorn 
himself to such an extent with flowers, ferns and scented 
leaves, that a botanist might have made an instructive capture 
in seizing his person. In addition to the flowers placed in his 
bushy mass of blackish-brown hair, he would tuck under his 
necklace and armlets sprigs and leaflets of numerous scented 
plants, such as Evodia hortensis and Ocymum sanctum. He 
would take much pleasure in pointing out to me the plants 
whose scented leaves are employed in the native perfumery, 
most of which are of the labiate order, and are to be com- 
monly found in the waste ground of the plantations. The 
women seldom decorate themselves in this manner. Those 
of Bougainville Straits make their scanty aprons of the leaves 
of a scitamineous plant named '^bassa," which, when crushed 
in the fingers, have a pleasant scent,' 

Several of the American Indian tribes have shown them- 
selves very fond of flowers. Tusayan maidens, according to 
Dr J. W. Fewkes, deck their hair, on holiday occasions, with 
CastiUeia affitiis and the flowers of QLnothera pinnatifida^ while 
a legend of the same people runs : ' Soon after people came 
up from the underworld, and were yet wandering in search of 



I88 THE CHILD 

permanent dwellings, some women daily plucked the flowers 
of this plant \_Sisymh'iiim canescens\ fluttering'' their yellow 
blossoms in the faces of the infants cradled on their backs to 
still their cries.' 

Mr Walter Hough informs us further as to the use of the 
flowers of Pentestemon ambiguus^ Verbesina enseloides^ and 
Castilleia linariaefolia. The flower of the Verbesina is ' worn 
by children in the hair on the forehead,' and concerning the 
Castilleia we learn : ' The flowers are worn for adornment by 
the girls. The name [wupa mansi] means " the great girl i 
flower." It is one of the very few attractive and beautiful I 
flowers of this region, and may appropriately be called the ' 
Hopi national flower.' The Abronia fragrans is ' placed on I 
a child's head to induce sleep' {Amer. Anthr., 1896, p. 43). ; 

The Kootenay Indians of South-eastern British Columbia '- 
call the Areiiai'ia pimgens {%2.x\dL-^'0x'i)^ K'sok'nokayok, 'beautiful 
flower,' admiring its flowers very much. For their scent they 
esteem highly several plants, — Oryzopsis asperifoliens^ Matri- • 
caria discoidea, Artemisia discolor^ etc., and the writer has seen '. 
Indians ' applying the latter to their nostrils, or, where it is i, 
found in great abundance, rofling about on the ground in j 
evident delight.' They sniffed at the flowers in great delight, \ 
as children and women often do, or as maidens do at the 
bunch of violets given them by their sweethearts. 

Esthetic Emotion in Children. — Perez's opinion that chil- 
dren ' are very little susceptible of real aesthetic emotion,' is 
cited with approval by Miss Lombroso, who remarks (369, 
p. .163): 'Certain spectacles in nature, certain works of art, 
strike them, but not deeply, and, indeed, only for those things, 
which attach themselves to their immediate experience. In 
the collection of Buisson, e.g.., containing more than 200 de- 
scriptive and imaginative themes of children from six to tw^elve 
years of age, one meets but few phrases that betray a sense of 
the picturesque, a certain sensibiUty for beautiful things.' As 
compared with American school-children, Italian and French 
children seem to have a higher sense of the picturesque, 
though all of them too often exhibit a geometric, commercial, 
anatomical, inventory sort of style and treatment, all full of 
arid, loose imagination, waked up here and there by an occa- 
sional striking word or genial turn of speech ; or, as sometimes 
happens, since naming a thing is, for the child, to see it, to 
possess it, he ' makes a rapid inventory of all sorts of things, 



THE ARTS OF CHILDHOOD 1 89 

just as in his play (the pleasure is analogous) he makes of a 
little heap of sand, castles, fortresses, etc' (p. 153). 

The judgment of the young as to the impression produced 
by the human face has been made the subject of experimental 
investigation by Professor Paolo Mantegazza, who exhibited 
to his class at the Institute in Florence ' a good photograph ' 
of a man or a woman, requesting them to express their views 
as to the aesthetic, moral and intellectual appearance of the 
physiognomy. The chief results are embodied below (399, 
p. 262) : — 



Impression. 


Esthetic. 


Moral. 


Intellectual. 






3 


£j 






i 






aJ 







Nationality. 


s 

rt 







1 


^ 
'v 


-6 







.'S 
'S, 


11 




pq 


^ 


^ 





^ 


M 


^ 


^ 


c/:i 


zo: 


Akka (Miani, Africa), 






















'pygmy' . 


6 


2 


.s 


5 


3 


s 


8 


2 


I 




Australian 


2 


I 


Q 


S 




7 


2 


I 


9 




Bali (Sunda Islands) little 






















gni .... 




8 


3 


8 


2 


I 


3 


s 


3 


II 


Coromandei (India) man . 


4 


,S 


3 


3 


I 


6 


S 


4 


I 


10 


Japanese little girl . 


7 


2 




8 


I 




3 


S 


I 


9 


Negro (Zanzibar) . 






9 




I 


8 


2 




7 


9 


Roman, pretty young girl 


9 


I 




7 


2 


I 


7 


2 


I 


10 


Roman peasant 


4 


S 


3 


I 


I 


10 


8 


2 


2 


12 


Siamese woman 


2 


II 


2 


10 


4 


I 


5 


7 


3 


15 



It will be seen that 'in judging strong expressions every- 
one agrees, while divergencies are very great when uncertain 
expressions are in question.' Mantegazza points out that face- 
study is one of the earliest arts, indeed f/ie earliest art of 
childhood; it may be said that the face of its elders is 
the child's chart and compass in the first voyages of life. 
[No wonder, then, that children's judgments of strange physiog- 
nomies, like those made by women, are so strangely confident 
and so often just. \With children, as in savage art, the eye 
often is all, and for them the ' evil eye ' is more of a fact than 
in the prejudiced mind of the adult parent or nurse. 



90 



THE CHILD 



Children's JDrawings. — One of the earliest notices of 
children's drawings is to be met with in Boccaccio. In the 
Decameron^ Novel VI., Day VL, Scalza seeks to prove that the 
Baronici are the oldest family in the world, being the ugliest, 
by the following argument : ' You must understand, therefore, 

that they were formed when 
Nature was in her infancy, 
and before she was perfect 
at her work; among them 
you will see one with a long, 
narrow face, another with a 
prodigious broad one ; one 
that is flat-nosed, another 
with a nose half an ell long ; 
this has a long hooked chin, 
that one eye bigger and set 
lower down than the other. 
In a word, their faces re- 
semble, for all the world, 
what children make when 
they first learn to draw.' It 
is quite appropriate, there- 
fore, that an Italian, Corrado 
Ricci, should give us, in his 
study of the art of little 
children, one of the first and 
best studies of the art pro- 
ducts of the child-mind. 
Ricci's investigation, sug- 
gested by a chance obser- 
vation of the verse and 
drawings (sometimes ob- 
scene and naturalistic) which 
young hands had inscribed 
upon the walls of a portico 
in Bologna, deals with some 1250 drawings, paintings, carvings, 
etc., of boys and girls of the elementary schools belonging to 
all conditions of life. Some 100 drawings w^ere obtained (in 
the course of five months) from the little daughter of one of 
his friends, about 250 came from the schools of Modena, the 
examples of plastic art were the result of the labours of some 
twenty children. 




DRAWING OF MAN BY SIX-YEAR- 
OLD CHILD. 



THE ARTS OF CHILDHOOD 



191 



Development of Child-Art. — The chief points with regard to 
the art of little children which Ricci notes are : i. They begin 
with man, the human form (head and legs, the rest has yet 
to come, and comes gradually, often not till the seventh or 
eighth year). 2. The peculiarities, errors and idiosyncrasies of 

the drawings of little 
children are due to the 
fact that they are de- 
scribing the man and 
not striving to repro- 
duce him artistically — 
that ' they are making 
with signs the very 
description they would 
make with words.' 
They know, e.g.^ that 
a man is always a 
biped, and they show 
his two legs, whether 
he is walking, standing, 
on horseback or in a 
boat. Even when he 
is hidden in part he is 
still the man as they 
see, know, speak of 
him, his two legs, 
arms, eyes, ears belong 
to him everywhere, 
and in profile-draw- 
ings, which come after 
full-face pictures, he 
preserves quite often 
his two eyes, or ac- 
quires an extra nose 
at one side of the face 
resulting from confusion of the profile and the full-face draw- 
ings. 3. In the child's first attempts at plastic arts the 
defects noticeable are — and here the art of the child gets 
close to that of savages — defects of technique ; the hand 
unskilled to draw is even more unskilled to model. The 
drawings of primitive peoples are often much superior to 
those of children, but their modellings and sculptures are 




DRAWING OF WOMAN BY SIX-YEAR- 
OLD CHILD. 



192 THE CHILD 

often no better at all. With the art of the great mediaeval 
decadence the points of contact are fewer, for the latter is 
rather defective than infantile, and the execution of the worst 
products of that age is generally better than that of the art of 
children and of savages. One thing, however, characterises 
them all in common, lack of proportion — birds as big as oxen 
on trees ; men larger than the houses ; horses half the size of the 
men upon them, etc. The children also have a less pronounced 
sense of perpendicularity. 4. The child mind soon comes 
to be more impressed by detail and minuteness than by the 
sublime — the pipe and the plug hat come to be almost the idea 
of the man. 5. The beautiful that children admire is not 
modified by so many considerations as is that worshipped by 
adults — it is simple, primitive, virgin. 6. The drawings of 
children show the influence of special facts or events in 
marked fashion. If children have seen a horse fall in the 
street, and are asked that day to draw a horse, 80 per cent, of 
them will draw the animal faUing; the drawings made on a 
snowy day are apt to be dotted all over with m^arks, etc. 

Ricci's general conclusion is that ' art as art is unknown to 
children,' and memory plays an important role: 'I have, 
in fact, proved in the case of children from many schools that, 
with one or two exceptions, those who made the best drawings 
were the best scholars, those who observe and remember most 
accurately, and are able to make a better inventory of the things 
learned by them when they have learned their lesson. Later, 
on the other hand, he may turn out to be a good and original 
artist who cut the poorest figure in the whole school ' (538, p. 
79). Sully repeats Ricci's statement that children in art begin 
where God left off, with man, and other more recent investi- 
gators have emphasised the child's early love for the human 
form as a subject of his art. 

Childrefi's Drawmgs and those of Primitive Peoples. — Pro- 
fessor Elmer E. Brown, summing up the results of the study 
of the drawings of four Californian children, concerning which 
interesting details are given, concludes : i. The first drawing 
was rather pictorial than decorative in character, the develop- 
ment of symmetric forms merely for the sake of beauty being 
of late occurrence and due to the influence of older persons. 2. 
The child's first chief interest is rather in the act of drawing 
than the product. 3. The drawing is only in a very limited 
degree the embodiment of the child's concept of the thing 



THE ARTS OF CHILDHOOD 193 

represented, since he lacks both the power of muscular co- 
ordination and the mastery of technique which such inter- 
pretation presupposes. 4. The seemingly symbolic is hardly 
more than a mere simplifying of figures to avoid the difficulty 
of naturalistic representation. 5. There is comparatively Httle 
marked conventionalisation. 6. The alternation between 
detail and general outline is noticeable. 7. There is little 
evidence of strong preference for colour. In the case of all 
these children (the oldest was but five at the time the last 
record was taken), Professor Brown remarks the distinct in- 
fluence of their civilised environment, a factor which certainly 
causes their art-products to be unlike in some respects those 
of primitive peoples. A careful examination of a large 
collection of drawings by the little daughter of Professor 
Myron T. Scudder, which the latter kindly placed at the 
disposal of the present writer, emphasises this cause of difi'er- 
ence, the importance of which appears even more clearly from 
the inspection of undoubted specimens of American aboriginal 
art. From the imitation of his civilised environment the 
modern child evolves art-products that are sometimes as far 
removed from those of the lower races as are ideas or ideals. 
Dr Ernst Grosse, who has discussed with great critical acumen 
the beginnings of art, writes of the comparisons usually in- 
stituted between the art of savages and the art of childhood as 
follows (254, p. 185) : 'It is just in this combination of truth 
to life and rudeness in representation that the essential 
peculiarity of primitive sculpture lies. It is, therefore, more 
surprising than pertinent to place the drawings of primitive 
peoples on the same stage with those of children. For of the 
keen observation gift, which appears unmistakably in all the 
drawings of hunter-races, with the best intentions in the world 
one can discover no trace in the unaided scribblings of 
children. The works of art with which our children decorate 
table and walls are far rather symbolical than naturalistic. The 
only real resemblance between the art of children and the art 
of primitive peoples lies in the fact that the latter know 
almost as little of perspective as the former. Like the drawings 
of children, the dra.wings of primitive peoples are often taken 
for caricatures, and in the one case this idea is as inexact as in 
the other. If a child or an Australian in a drawing dispro- 
portionately sets off any part of the body or the dress, it 
signifies — provided, of course, that is done intentionally and 

N 



194 



THE CHILD 



not out of mere awkwardness — simply that that particular part, 
for some reason or other, has seemed specially noteworthy to 
the artist. Children and savages really have a strong penchant 
for satire, and it may therefore safely be assumed that cari- 
catures will be found among the products of primitive art. 
But it is not easy to detect them, and consequently it is well 
to declare caricatures only those primitive drawings whose 
satirical intention is expressly attested.' 

Observation. — A careful study of some 300 drawings of the 
Kootenay Indians of British Columbia, obtained by the 
present writer during the summer of 189 1, corroborates the 




DRAWING OF SUNSET BY KOOTENAY INDIAN. 



view of Dr Grosse as to the influence of their strong observa- 
tion-gift upon the drawings of primitive peoples. Life and 
action, unmistakably represented and consciously recognised, 
are there. Characteristic attitudes are reproduced, environ- 
ment often suggested, and a fidelity to nature constantly 
recurs of which children so often know little or nothing. The 
figures in primitive art live, move, and have their being. 
Froebel said very justly (225, p. 171): 'Give the child a bit 
of chalk or the like, and soon a new creation will stand before 
him and you,' but the new world thus called into existence 
will differ in some marked respects from the world of savage 



THE ARTS OF CHILDHOOD 195 

art. It is very doubtful if any of the truly primitive races of 
men are quite as clumsy in their art-expression as many 
children, or produce so often such ' wooden ' effects. 

As interesting examples of the art-development of different 
peoples we may take the paintings of the Mojos Indians of 
Bolivia, and the sculpture of the ancient Peruvians. Of the 
former Herndon ^ says : ' The Mojos Indians have a natural 
fondness for painting the human figures and representing birds 
and animals, particularly the common chicken and the 
cow ' [both introduced by the whites]. ' The latter seems to 
have made a deep impression upon them at first sight ; they 




DRAWING OF COYOTE OR PRAIRIE WOLF BY KOOTENAY 
INDIAN. 

often paint the cow fighting or chasing a man. These Indians 
describe the novel sights. I have not seen a single painting 
of an Indian or an animal which originally belonged on this 
pampa. The white man, the cow and the chicken cock are 
their favourite studies. On the white walls of their houses, inside 
and out, such figures appear as a decoration. In the rooms of 
the government houses the best artist displayed his talent, and 
those drawings on the walls of the market-place are admired 
by all who go there. So much taste and caution have the 
boys and little children, that none of them are known to dis- 
figure any of these paintings in the public market-place. The 
1 Valley of Amazon, Vol. H., 1S54, p. 237. 



196 THE CHILD 

whole country is a dead level ; the view only extends to the 
horizon, the sky above, and one continued sheet of herd-grass 
below. The Mojos Indian makes a scene for himself, and 
describes it with coloured paints. On a windy day he strikes 
light and puts fire to the dry prairie-grass. As the wind 
carries the fire swiftly along, and the sheets of blaze shoot up, 
the Indian sketches the effect produced upon the cattle, who 
toss their tails into the air and rush in fear, with heads 
erect, at the top of their speed in an opposite direction to that 
from which the wind comes. He decorates the inside wall 
of his house with this scene, which is a common one on these 
prairie lands.' 

Love of Life and Motion. — This eager desire to portray life 
and motion has been noted by many observers of children, 
and Dr Lukens cites with approval Hirth's lament that children 
are never seen taking drawing lessons in menageries. The 
restraints of civilised life have prevented this very thing which 
savage peoples can and do do — sketching from the living, 
moving object. 

Dr Grosse seeks to explain the remarkable artistic skill 
of the men of the river-drift in France, the modern Eskimo 
and many other primitive peoples, past and present, as the 
natural development of two qualities, which in the early history 
of the race must have been indispensable in the struggle for 
existence — a gift of observation and manual dexterity ; wherever 
everyone has to be a good huntsman and a good handicraftsman, 
he may also be a tolerable drawer and carver. ^This is the 
'solution of the riddle of the reindeer period.' Everywhere, 
continues Dr Grosse, we see the contrast between hunter-folk 
and agricultural and pastoral peoples revealing itself in the 
rarity among the latter of the talent for life-like and nature-true 
drawing and carving, and cites particularly the statement of 
Fritsch as to the difference between the 'living sketches of 
the Bushmen and the stiff, grotesque animal forms which the 
Bantu models and carves with such trouble' (254, p. 390). 
If agricultural and pastoral peoples excel hunter-folk in culture, 
they stand far below them in the plastic arts, another proof 
of the lack of correlation between art and civilisation. The 
great men of a shepherd-folk are poets rather than draughts- 
men, and the older, wordless art is often truer to nature and 
to life. 

Grosse's view as to the partnership of a keen observation-gift 



THE ARTS OF CHILDHOOD I97 

and great manual dexterity in the production of the wonderfully 
accurate and skilful drawings and carvings of primitive man 
receives support from the examination by Miss Louisa McDer- 
mott of the drawing-papers of 720 Indian children (besides 
those of 60 adults) in the reservation-schools of the United 
States, from which it appears that : ' The Indian child has 
more native talent for drawing than the white child ; he has 
an earlier development as well. This is shown by the better 
control of the finger movements.' Similarly Miss Marguerite 
Gallagher notes among the differences observed between 300 
papers ' the spontaneous drawings of the children of the Indian 
school at Pipestone Agency,' and those of white children of 
like age : 'Tneir drawings contain more life and action. More 
stories are told in pictures than in the same number of other 
drawings' (385, pp. 132, 134). 

^ Skeuomorphism^ — In the history of primitive art the fact 
repeatedly comes out that in the fabrication of new things the 
inventor's chief aim was to preserve, or to embellish, the old. 
Hence many of the new art-products are simply copies, in 
other material, of the old, the structure of the latter determining 
the form and the ornamentation of the new manufacture. Such 
transformations and transferences Dr H. Colley March has 
styled ' skeuomorphs ' (from the Greek word (Txsuoc, 'imple- 
ment,' iJ^op(p'/], ' figure, form '), and much interesting information 
concerning their origin and development may be found in 
Professor Haddon's Evolution m Art (263, p. 75), F. H. 
Cushing's study of ' Pueblo Pottery as illustrative of Zuni 
Culture-growth,' and the numerous essays of Professor W. H. 
Holmes, especially his Origin and Development of Form and 
Ornament in Ceramic Ai't. Holmes goes so far as to say : 
'In the first stages of art, when a savage makes a weapon, he 
modifies or copies a weapon, when he makes a vessel he 
modifies or copies a vessel.' 

■, We are thus enabled to account for the great antiquity of 
certain artistic forms and fashions of ornament. Pottery goes 
back to clay-lined wicker, grass, or bark vessels and gourds; 
the ornamentation of the bronze celt repeats the lashing and 
binding of the old stone axe; the rock-tombs of Lycia are 
' models in stone of wooden dwellings ' ; the gable of the latter 
has become 'the crowning glory of Grecian temples,' the tree 
corner-post, the beautiful column with its wonderful capital 
(263, p. 114). A glance at any modern building or into any 



I9B THE CHILD 

furnished apartment will reveal scores of these ancient skeuo- 
morphs, whose existence seems evidence of the essentially 
conservative and misoneistic nature of man, particularly in the 
early stages of artistic development. 

The art of childhood, too, is largely skeuomorphic, in the 
school, at least. Dr H. T. Lukens remarks very appositely : 
' In many of the kindergarten drawings that have been sent in 
I have been struck with the angular style of the features, as if 
the children had carried over to their free-hand drawing the 
wooden effects of stick-laying, drawing on square-ruled paper, and 
constructing trees and umbrellas out of squares and triangles.' 
Without a model to skeuomorphise their natural bent, however, 
children are, perhaps, scribble-minded and naively artistic in 
the highest sense, as many of their unaided productions show 
in their chief elements. Dr Lukens's complaint that 'some 
drawing-teachers think it the acme of pedagogic skill to make 
use of geometric shapes,' and take 'all life and action' out of 
children's pictures by making the lines straight, belongs with 
Professor A. Griinwedel's protest against 'the attempted "cor- 
rect" reproduction of aboriginal ornament according to the 
European so-called feeling for beauty, whereby somewhat 
crooked lines are replaced by straight ones, and unequal halves, 
which are deemed corresponding, are made alike' (263, p. 335). 
Professor Griinwedel observes further : ' The Oranghutan ' [tribe 
of the Malay peninsula] ' draws a curve and sees it as a straight 
line, he makes too many legs, too few fingers, but has, in spite 
of these faults, according to our conceptions, the power of 
seizing abbreviations of parts of the body in a picturesque 
manner, of skilfully interpreting contours, and of preparing 
intelligent ground-plans. The diagramm.atic copying of primi- 
tive ornamental forms can therefore have no scientific value.' 
The curved lines of the savage and the child belong together, 
are, in fact, the primitive line of beauty. 

The preponderance of animal-pictures in the art-work of 
primitive man is remarkable. Says Professor Wilson: "There 
have been found in Western Europe about 400 specimens of 
this engraved and sculptured work belonging to the Palaeolithic 
period. Of these, four-fifths are representations of animals' 
(687, p. 412). In this period indeed, 'nearly every animal 
belonging to that epoch, from man down, has been graphically 
represented.' In the following Neolithic period, however, 
' there are innumerable specimens of decorative art as applied 



THE ARTS OF CHILDHOOD 199 

to industry, while we are wholly without graphic delineations of 
the animals of the period, and no attempt appears to have been 
made to represent any living thing, or to make a representation 
of nature in any of its forms ' (421). ':;The school with us to-day 
seems to endeavour to hurry the child into a ' neolithic period ' 
which has not the naturalness or the spontaneity of that of the 
race. 

Cult of Line and Afigle. — E. Cooke, criticising the drawing- 
instruction in the schools of London, cites with approval the 
dictum of Ruskin : \K great draughtsman can, so far as I have 
observed, draw everyline but a straight one,' and laments the 
devotion to lines and angles and geometrical - ornamental 
models shown in the schools, caHing for the introduction of 
living objects, human beings, animals, plants, flowing water, 
blazing fire, etc., and other beautiful or interesting live things 
of nature. \When the child longs to turn out men, dogs, cats, 
horses, houses, boats, etc., he is shorn of his freedom and 
bidden to draw a straight line, a cube or the like. When 
nature intends him as yet to be a player, an artist only, the 
school seeks to make of him a geometrician -, when he desires 
to make many lines he is confined to one, when he endeavours 
to produce a whole it seeks to make him produce parts only. 
Neither the child nor primitive man begins with a geometric 
line — it is in a scribble that the history of graphic art lies hid.' 

Some very interesting facts are contained in a paper by 
H. G. Fitz, who holds — and his statements rest upon '21,600 
measurements of 2700 individuals '— :;:that 'the average school- 
training has carried those who have followed it no nearer suc- 
cess in drawing than those who have not been so trainedy 
(Too often the child has been taught technical tricks instead 
of observing facts — he has had too many facilities and too few 
facts. Very many child-drawings are simply ' line-making with- 
out conscious effort,' and never get beyond caricature. The 
accurate seeing of the child's eye is under-estimated, ' volun- 
tary attention, the foundation of the power of observation,' is 
neglected, too much precious time is wasted in ' technical 
finish,' and it is forgotten that the ' drawing ' itself is of no con- 
sequence except as it stands for the record (209). 

Resemblance of Art of Children and Savages. — -How narrow 
the lines sometimes are which divide the art-products of the 
savage from those of the child and again from those of the 
ignorant peasant is shown by the fact that the Abbe 



200 THE CHILD 

Domenech's American Lidian Fidographical Manuscript (i68), 
published in i860 as an example of Indian pictography, was 
shown by Julius Petzholdt, the eminent orientalist, to consist 
only of ' scribblings and incoherent illustrations of a local Ger- 
man dialect.' Dr A. S. Gatschet, describing the Vatican MS. 
No. 3773, a pictorial MS. of the ancient Aztecs of Mexico, 
says^: 'One who had not previously seen a Mexican manu- 
script would, when first inspecting this volume, naturally be- 
lieve it to be a picture book for small children. The gaudy 
colours, the strange acts in which the persons figured are 
engaged, their curious accoutrements bedecked with ornaments, 
the grotesque and impossible animals assembled on almost 
every page, sometimes serving as sacrificial victims, afford a 
sight "fearful and wonderful to behold." A closer comparative 
study, however, soon reveals the fact that the drawings are 
of a symbolic nature, and that every picture has a meaning 
disclosable by profound study of the Nahua people, their 
customs and artistic development.' 

No. '^2) of the Worcester child-observations on ' Imitation ' 
(291, p. 13) reads: 'Jack, age two years. Jack spit on his 
fingers, and rubbed the. wall of the house. He continued 
doing so for three or four minutes. I said, " What is Jack 
doing?" He answered, "Jack painting house."' 

This recalls the fact that the primitive form of painting was 
the rubbing into the skin of certain parts of the body the simple 
colour-substances of early times. ' To paint ' and 'to rub ' are 
synonymous in several languages of the lower races of men, e.g.^ 
Klamath : taldka, to paint, to varnish, means to rub with 
palm. 

Art and Magic. — AVhile perhaps the great majority of the 
carvings of the primitive cave-men of France ' do not exceed 
in point of execution the schoolboy's sculptures on the wall,' 
the images of the reindeer, M. Popoff points out, are of a 
higher order of excellence, the characteristic lines of the 
animal being traced with remarkable care. Besides these, the 
figures of men so far found 'are puerile, almost caricatures, 
and utterly out of proportion.' These early savages, as 
Broca remarked, drew, for some reason or other, the figures of 
their fellows very badly. The total absence of designs from 
the plant world is noteworthy also. From consideration of 
these facts, Popoff puts forward the theory that these primitive 
^ A me?-. Anthr., Jan. 1897. 



THE ARTS OF CHILDHOOD 201 

artistic products ' were not intended for ornamentation merely, 
nor yet as imitation pure and simple of nature, but as an 
instrument for struggling against nature.' In other words, 
when the cave-dweller of the Dordogne engraved on the handle 
of his poignard the image of a reindeer — the most important of 
the animal world to him — it was not by way of ornamenting 
his weapon, but because he thought by this means ' to exercise 
some magic power over his prey,' a view not so very far 
from that which long survived in witchcraft. The closer the 
resemblance of his carving or drawing to the actual form of the 
animal, the greater was his chance of acting upon him, and we 
have thus a very early and powerful reason for rapid improve- 
ment in art of the kind in question. Like his nearest con- 
gener, the modern Eskimo, the ancient cave-man was milder 
and less given to raising his hand against the life of his fellows 
than we are wont to suppose ; he warred against the animals 
for food, clothing and implements, not against the men for 
wives, property or land. Carving and the related arts 
(painting included) owe their origin, according to Popoff, to 
primitive man's 'attempt to reach the living animal through its 
image,' just as the civilised man to-day seeks life in works 
of art. Magic, then, is the mother of painting and sculpture — 
a thought aptly expressed by the song of the American Indian 
medicine-man, ' my drawing makes of me a god.' 

Some Causes of Poverty in Art. — According to Mr McGuire, 
who has sketched the ' Development of Sculpture ' (387), 
(^mall carvings of bone, of ivory, or of wood, appear to be 
common to every race, and were probably carried on the 
person. ' Sculpture,' however, ' accompanies a settled stage 
of society. On the other hand, carving is an art commonly 
found among the most savage races. The development of 
skill in carving is often encountered in the most unexpected 
localities, and in places where no evidences are found of the 
sculpture of large figures ' [the size of statues is known to 
increase as man occupies continuously particular sites and lives 
in settlements]. This difference appears directly traceable to 
the mode of life which savagery entails. Wandering during 
the hunter period from point to point with the change of 
seasons, or as game or fruit became abundant or scarce, with 
no fixed dwellings and with no ability to transport heavy 
statues, there was no incentive to make them.' Mr McGuire 
rejects the theory that sculpture owes its origin to 'the artificial 



202 THE CHILD 

incision of lines upon rock surfaces,' holding that ' a few blows 
given to a stone, shaped by any of the processes of nature 
referred to ' [conglomerates, erosion by freezing and thawing, 
carving by wind-blown sand, silt-grinding, water-washing, etc.], 
' would develop figures, and would, it is believed, soon lead to a 
deliberate and intentional shaping of stones.' This seems 
proved, in some parts of the world at least, by ' the finding 
of water-washed peebles resembling animals or natural imple- 
ments, often associated with the remains of the earliest periods 
of human existence, especially of those of the caves and 
shelters which were man's first dwehing-places.' 

Macaulay is not far- from the truth when, in his essay 
on Dryden, he says : VThe first works of the imagination are 
poor and rude, not from the want of genius, but from the want 
of materials. Phidias could have done nothing with an old 
tree and a fish-bone, or Homer with the language of New 
Holland.' This point has been almost completely ignored by 
more than one recent writer on primitive art and by nearly all 
those who have treated of the art of children. The stimulating 
and interfering role of material, in the evolution of the primitive 
shaping arts especially, is certainly very great, while its re- 
tarding, or even retrogressive, effect is often by no means 
insignificant. 

Earth Moulding. — Not very much has been written about 
earth-moulding by primitive races, but it seems to be quite 
common. Mr R. H. Mathews has given an interesting account 
of the ground drawings of the Australian aborigines, which are 
of four kinds : (i) figures outfined by laying down logs, bark 
or bushes to a certain height and then covering them with 
earth; (2) figures formed entirely of loose earth heaped up into 
the required shape (sometimes figures outlined in bark are 
placed on top of these) ; (3) figures, devices, patterns cut into 
the surface of the ground (the groove being two or three inches 
wide and about two inches deep) with tomahawks or flat pieces 
of wood with an edge; (4) figures drawn on the sand with 
a stick. The size and variety of all these drawings is very 
great, and some of them ' display the inventive, humorous, and 
imitative faculties of the natives,' especially as to the habits and 
institutions of the white settlers. A point of contact with the 
drawings of children lies just here, in the tendency to 
caricature. Mr Mathews observes that ' earthen figures formed 
in high relief or engraven upon the turf, representing human 



THE ARTS OF CHILDHOOD 203 

beings, different animals, and the curious designs called 
yajnmunyamim are found chiefly at those places where the 
young men of the tribe are admitted into the ranks of 
manhood.' Mr J. W. Fawcett is quoted as saying that certain 
aborigines of the Herbert River region in Queensland amused 
themselves by drawing with sticks on the beach figures of men, 
birds, lizards, turtles, canoes, etc. ; and Mr S. Gason, of 
Beltana, South Australia, reports that ' the aborigines, old and 
young, amuse themselves by portraying various objects on the 
sand by means of a piece of stick. These drawings consisted 
chiefly of kangaroos, dogs, snakes, fish and emus, and other 
birds.' 

Another procedure suggestive of children's ' drawings ' is 
described by Mr C. Winnecke as ' a frequent pastime of the 
natives,' both in South and North Australia : 'To select a clay- 
pan and on its flat surface to outline circles, squares, and other 
figures by means of small stones placed in a single row 
along th§ outlines of the figures to be delineated. The stones 
are sometimes carried to the clay-pans from long distances, 
none being obtainable in the immediate vicinity ' (416). 

The child (sometimes the adult) at the seaside, or in 
the sand-lot, offers many parallels here, and how far the 
imagination may go can be read in Dr Hall's interesting ' Story 
of a Sand-Pile ' (272). 

Illustrated Stories,— ^\\Q. great skill shown by children in 
illustrating, out of their own heads, stories and anecdotes 
told them by teachers, parents, other children, etc., or even 
stories invented by themselves, offers a point of comparison with 
the pictographs, ivory scratchings, carvings and the like of 
primitive races — Bushmen, Eskimo, cave-men — where we have, 
beyond a doubt, a similar effort of our remote forefathers to 
illustrate a story and enjoy with added zest the reminiscence of 
hunting adventures, conflicts, etc. In the collections of Hoff- 
man, Wilson, Andree we have doubtless many figures of 
just such an origin. Had we all the product of these primitive 
minds we would probably find many pendants and parallels for 
the thousands of illustrations which have followed in the wake 
of the American experiments with the stories of ' Struwwelpeter,' 
' Hans-guck-in-die-Luft,' ' Washington and the Cherry-Tree,' 
etc., and the German experiments with ' Little Red Riding 
Hood,' 'The Two Hares,' etc. Illustrative art begins early in 
the individual and in the race. This is particularly true of 



204 THE CHILD 

a hunting and fishing people Hke the Eskimo, as is revealed by 
the figures reproduced in Dr Hoffman's wonderfully complete 
discussion of their graphic art. The figures in Wilson's 
' Prehistoric Art ' often emphasise the same point, apparently. 
In her brief comparison of Eskimo drawings (from Alaska) 
with those of civilised children — the Eskimo drawings are 
by an adult and some children under 14 — Mrs Louise Maitland 
(392, p. 450) notes that ' story-telling or record predominates 
over representative work.' The Eskimo, as compared with the 
civilised children, exhibit 'much greater graphic skill in 
manipulation,' while 'in the composition or arrangement of 
their drawings, the children in their younger years show a 
correspondence with the Eskimo ; at an older age they pass 
more frequently to a higher artistic development.' Some of 
the similarities observed between the drawings of civilised 
children and Eskimo Mrs Maitland attributes to what Dr 
Brinton calls ' the tendency of the mind, everywhere and 
in all conditions, to act in the same manner.' 

Eaidiest Human Art— The drawings, engravings and 
sculptures of Palaeolithic man are, . according to Professor 
Wilson, ' the foundation and beginning of all art,' and they 
' show the natural or original germ of art in the human mind 
uninfluenced by anything beyond the necessary environment of 
hfe and the inevitable conditions of existence' (687, p. 418). 
The impulse which led early man to the production of these 
art-forms was ' his love of beauty and his desire to gratify it ' 
— they represent primitive aesthetics : ' They had no occult 
meaning ; they never stood for any great divinity or power, 
whether natural or supernatural ; they were simply lines and 
dots arranged in ornamental form to gratify man's innate sense 
of beauty, and because he wished the things he possessed to be 
beauteous in his eyes' (687, p. 419). These Palaeolithic 
motifs^ Professor Wilson tells us, were repeated again and again 
in the civilisation of the Neolithic and Bronze ages, where 
we see ' how they varied, how they grew, and yet how, down to 
the end of the pre-historic and the beginning of the historic 
period, they never got beyond lines or dots, which combined 
made the parallel lines, the chevron, the herring-bone, the 
zig zag, and similar simple geometric designs.' The art of 
the Neohthic epoch was essentially decorative then as con- 
trasted with the animal-forms of the Palaeolithic period, and the 
geometric ornaments ' were principally employed in plastic art, 



THE ARTS OF CHILDHOOD 205 

and usually for the decoration of pottery.' The author further 
holds (687, p. 419) that, ' while there have been inventions and 
duplicate inventions of new designs and reinventions of for- 
gotten ones ... as a rule the perpetuation of ornamental 
designs was by imitation and teaching, passing from generation 
to generation, from parent to child, and from master to servant 
or slave.' Professor Wilson seems to sympathise but little with 
the doctrine of the parallelism of degree of development and 
thought and action, or with the theory of the uniformity of the 
human mind everywhere. 

The absence of symbolism in the earliest known art of the 
human race is thus commented upon by the same auth- 
ority in his account of Prehistoric Art (687, p. 412) : 
' There were ' [in the art of the Palaeolithic period in Europe], 
' some geometric designs. These were by Hues or dots, and, 
curiously enough, never or rarely in the form of a cross, 
triangle, square or circle, concentric or otherwise. They con- 
sisted of parallel lines, sometimes crossed, sometimes drawn in 
different directions, zig zags, chevrons, and sometimes the 
double chevron, giving it the appearance of the letter X. On 
some of the long straight instruments of bone appear undulating 
wavy lines, and in a few cases are round, slightly pointed 
projections — protuberances like a mamelon. 

•' In all these combinations of figures none have been found 
which seem to have any meaning or to have the form of any 
letter-word or hieroglyphic. They do not correspond to any 
sign, ideographic or hieroglyphic. The cross is not found ; 
there is no representation of sun-worship, nor of the sea, nor 
of any divinity, good or bad. Apparently there had been no 
thought other than that apparent upon the face of the picture. 
For instance, when horses are represented following each 
other, we can understand that there is a drove. When the 
mammoth is represented, we understand that the artist has 
seen the animal. When a man is represented following the 
bison, and in the act of throwing his spear, we can understand 
that a hunting scene is meant. Beyond these and similar 
views, no ideas seem to have been attempted. But we are to 
remember the paucity of the sources of our knowledge.' 

Professor Wilson believes the drawings, engravings and 
sculpture of Palaeolithic man 'were drawings made direct 
from nature, with the original before the eye of the artist,' not 
copies or adaptations. The present writer has noted more 



2o6 



THE CHILD 



than once the tendency of the American Indian to draw from 
life rather than from memory. The following drawing by a 
girl of six years is a good example of the child's tendency to 
group things incongruously and to picture them disproportion- 
ately, while, at the same time, it shows how early the sun- 
picture, by imitation or by original drawing, occurs with the 
young artist. Figure A in the drawing represents ' the sun 
what be's up in the good morning,' and Figure B the spaniel 




^A 



i^-Ri. 



DRAWING BY SIX-YEAR-OLD GIRL. 
(Fig. A., the Sun ; Fig. B, a Dog.) 



dog of a friend. The child "(born in Worcester, Mass., of 
Lithuanian parents) also shows distinct evidence of having 
been influenced by the pictures, rites and ceremonies of the 
Greek Church, and with her the cross and ring have already 
become somewhat symbolic. 

Three very interesting examples of the degeneration, 
degradation and alteration of symbols are given by Colonel 
Mallery in his discussion of the ' dangers of symbolic interpreta- 



THE ARTS OF CHILDHOOD 20/ 

tion.' 1 The chevron on the sleeves of non-commissioned officers 
(chosen, when the modern uniform was planned, from among 
the various heraldic symbols, because it was easy to form an 
obtuse angle with two strips of cloth), goes back to ' an 
honourable ordinary in heraldry, representing two rafters of a 
house united at the top, originally bestowed on the founder of 
a house or family thereafter entitled to bear arms.' The 
initial IjL of medical prescriptions (' vulgarly called an 
abbreviation of the word " Recipe " ') once ' portrayed the 
extended wings of Jove's eagle, and was used as a prayer to 
the king of gods for his aid to the action of the remedy.' 
The barber's pole of certain patriotic American ' tonsorial 
artists,' who ' added blue to the red and white, so as to include 
all the national colours,' — an idea which the negroes, who have 
taken up so readily the profession, ' have advanced another 
step, so that their newest poles ' [the paper was written in 1881] 
' show the blue in a union, with the proper arrangement of 
stars, and the red and white stripes extending straight instead 
of spirally, — becomes nothing more nor less than a wooden 
United States flag of clumsy shape.' 

Atavism in symbols characterises the criminal — pathology 
in symbols the lunatic. As Ferrero remarks, ' there is always 
a correspondence between the intellectual condition and the 
system of symbols employed to express the ideas; in the 
criminal a primitive sign-system corresponds to a mental 
state, in part primitive and rude ; in the lunatic a system of 
delirious symbols corresponds to a dehrious state of ideas.' 
Unlike criminals, ' madmen seldom employ the ordinary signs 
or writing, or content themselves with pictography,' but they 
' invent special signs, mixing them up with figures, words, 
letters of the alphabet, and creating a bizarre writing very 
difficult to comprehend, and in itself evidence enough of the 
disordered condition of their minds.' With the lunatic, also, 
the symbol does not escape the 'reduction,' to which are 
subject all his sensations, images, feelings, ideas. These 
marks of the madman in no way necessarily characterise the 
pictographs or the tattooing of the criminal (199, p. 190). 

General Characteristics of Child Art. — Pappenheim (474, 
p. 62), summarising the results of the numerous studies of the 
drawings of children, indicates thus the chief points observed : 
1 Trans. Anthr, Soc, Wash., I. i., 71-79. 



208 THE CHILD 

I. In the drawing activity of the little child artistic intent 
is absent, the 'joy of making and doing' (movement of the 
hand and production of lines) is alone expressed. 2. Limi- 
tation in the direction of the technique of drawing renders 
more difficult to the child the expression of his ideas. 3. 
Mental activity prevents the child from continuously fixing his 
attention upon the same object and systematically observing 
it ; the unlimited fancy of the child, stirred by the lines 
(perhaps unsuccessful) already drawn, wanders av/ay alto- 
gether. 4. The child is ruled by one strong aim — to make 
the drawing with the least possible number of expressive lines. 
5. The child uses symbols (schemata) which it has received 
from other children, or from adults. 6, Habit causes the 
child often to use the same symbols for related objects. 7. 
The distinctive characteristics of the object to be drawn, 
which the child has in his head, are enumerated by him in a 
linear description. 8. In drawing the child is guided more by 
his knowledge of the thing as a whole — the concept of its 
external appearance remains in the background. 9. By a too 
great admixture of intelligence, the child's sense-perceptions 
are, for artistic purposes, falsified. 10. The endeavour to 
draw by imitation an object or a model, or to represent some- 
thing beautiful, causes the child to lose his pleasure in 
'malendes Zeichnen.' 

The various factors entering into the drawing phenomena 
of childhood differ with individuals very much, while environ- 
ment and opportunity cut short or prolong the processes under 
consideration. Gotze, in his ' Child as Artist,' emphasises the 
child's love of his ' maze of lines,' his animism — what is for 
adults a 'not I ' is for him an 'I too' (247, p. 7) — and the 
naivete with which he shares his life, thought, actions with 
everything and everybody, and the value of drawing as the 
natural, preparatory stage for writing (herein the child repeats 
the race). 

Stages in Drawing. — In Sully, Barnes, Cooke, and other 
writers on the subject, many details will be found as to the 
various periods, stages or epochs of evolution in the drawings 
of the child. Dr H. T. Lukens (379, p. 167), however, has 
given perhaps the best general presentation of the growth and 
fluctuation of the instinct for drawing in children. He 
recognises four periods, which, with the chief characteristics 
of each, may be described as follows : — 



THE ARTS OF CHILDHOOD 209 

I. First Period^ up to about four o/j- five years of age. 
Here the child scribbles only, and is dominated by interest in 
the finished product. Practice increases the pleasure felt in 
drawing, 

II- Second Period^ from about the fifth to the tenth year. 
Here the drawing becomes the visual foundation for the 
mental picture, and the child uses a few bold, speaking lines 
to give expression, or rather to intimate it, for now the child 
sees not merely the scrawl it produces, but what is behind it, 
the picture of fancy, which is only hinted, not reproduced 
in the drawing. This period, which the school so often 
succeeds in paralysing, is ' the golden age of the artistic 
development of the child.' This is the creative period /^r se ; 
here the child is likest the real artistic genius, whose product 
is more of a substitute for, than a strict imitation of, nature. 
It is the period of Lange's ' artistic illusion.' All this is 
destroyed when the teacher comes to say, ' Open your eyes, O 
child, see how much better the model is j draw, paint after it ! ' 
for the child by nature is qualified to picture the absent, the 
imagined, not the cool, classic present set before him. 

III. Third Period, from about the tenth to about the fif- 
teenth year. In the beginning of this period the environment 
and the school have repressed the productive activity of the 
child in the endeavour to increase his intellectuality. The 
child now ' begins to see that his drawing is nothing more 
than a poor, weak imitation of nature,' and the charm of creative 
art vanishes with the disappearance of the former naive faith. 
No wonder so many observers have noted a distinct deteriora- 
tion both in the pleasure in, and the quality of, the drawings 
of children, beginning with the tenth or twelfth year — ' die 
Zauber ist hin.' This is the period of ' Barnes' level,' at 
which most men remain all their lives. 

IV. Fourth Period, from about the fifteenth to about the 
twentieth year. For some fortunate individuals, favoured by 
environment or other stimulus, adolescence exhibits a recru- 
descence of the old creative power, a reinvigoration of the 
pristine love of producing. This is the period of ' Miller's 
rise ' in the curve representing the progress of drawing in the 
child. All these periods are further marked by the fact that 
the child, when working as a child, draws from memory and 
imagination, even when he has the object to be drawn before 
him. 



210 THE CHILI3 

Within the four -periods just described, there can be dis- 
cerned transitional periods, viz., at about the fourth year, 
around the eighth and ninth years, and about the fifteenth 
year. 

Draiving in Education. — In the course of hic ?nneal for a 
reform of the drawing-instruction in the pubHc schools, which 
shall make it 'the school of sight,' not the grave of talent and 
naturalness (as Hirth has called it), Dr Albert Heim (292) of 
Zurich observes : ' Many a fifteen-year old boy and many an 
adult can, e.g.^ no longer draw the picture of a bird, which at 
the age of from five to ten years he was able to make before 
any instruction in drawing.' The delight in drawing which 
reigned in the earlier years has been suppressed under the weight 
of method and direction, the child's own book, filled with in- 
numerable 7idive sketches of almost every object, disappears 
before the sheet with the correctly-drawn ornament or geometri- 
cal figure ; life no longer calls to him to represent it, the deadest 
of dead things are fashioned by him at the beck of others. 
The beautiful curves he has seen in Nature subside before the 
cube, the square and the triangle, with their uninspiring 
straight lines. For ten geniuses of the nursery in drawing 
there remains hardly one in the high school. Ornament, a 
comparatively late product of the human mind, in its regu- 
larity and rigidity, its conventionalism and lifelessness, has 
been allowed to extinguish that art of drawing in early child- 
hood which by its very 'play' asserts its kinship with real 
genius. The net result is a few clever ornamentalists and a 
host of disgusted children, whom different treatment would 
have permitted to assert more of their inherent love for and 
delight in drawing. Plaster - casts are always dead beside 
living nature, and the exaggeration of the artist hardly makes 
up for lost naivete ; besides, they give not at all the right 
opportunity for individual genius. Like primitive peoples, 
children draw naively and well according as they observe, and 
the old men of the French river-drift period had something 
more valuable than the mere technique of drawing — they had 
the genius that reproduces the life-touch. We ought to aim 
at preserving the genius for drawing innate in the child rather 
than to create another sort of artist by means of instruction 
during the school years. Something of ' the atrophy of the 
power of observation,' and 'the barrenness of results,' which 
are stated to be the common effects of a twenty years' exist- 



THE ARTS OF CHILDHOOD 211 

ence of drawing as a part of the public school curriculum in 
New York State, may be read in Mr H. G, Fitz's article 
(209, p. 755), where emphasis is laid upon the futility of 
' putting the child in possession of technical tricks, which 
make observing facts of no account.' Mr Fitz recommends 
the setting aside or destroying of free-hand drawings as soon 
as made, to ' remove the temptation to waste time in technical 
finish that might, to the pupil's lasting benefit, be spent in 
new efforts at discovery, discriminating differences in various 
enclosed areas, values or colours.' Thus, according to Mr 
Fitz, ' we might then come to be able to see the beautiful in 
Nature spread at our feet, and in common things at our very 
j door, and not, as now, under the name of art^ hew down the 
\ mind of the rising generation to the narrow notion that the 
beautiful must be sought only on the canvases and in the 
conventionalities of the past or present age of interpreters, 
however exquisite or grand their works may be.' We should 
! cease trying to kill the art that made art. 




THE BORDERLAND OF ATAVISM. 

(A ' soft tail ' on a Chinese boy eight years old, drawn by R. 
A. Cushman from the figure in Btdl. Soc. d'Anthr. de Paris, 
1872, p. 540.) 



CHAPTER VII 

THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 

Evolution Idea knowji to Primitive Peoples. — Evolution, in 
some form or other, is now the accepted doctrine of men of 
science, with few exceptions, throughout the civilised world, 
and with this theory is bound up the essential oneness of all 
phenomena of nature and all facts of life. But this is, at 
bottom, really no new doctrine, but the clearer statement and 
satisfactory demonstration of a very old one. Greece and 
India in very ancient times, as the fragments of their philo- 
sophies reveal, glimpsed the general doctrine, while particular 
forms of it belong to savage and barbarous peoples all over 
the globe. The kinship of all animate, nay, of all animate 
and inanimate, things — evolution, transformation, adaptation, 
heredity, degeneracy, selection — are really all very old ideas, 
known, in rude form, to the ancient philosophers of the Old 
World and to innumerable primitive tribes, who, quaintly and 
curiously sometimes, have dimly or clearly glimpsed or antici- 
pated the thought of Lamarck, Darwin, Wallace, Spencer, 
Haeckel, Cope, Weismann and the other great interpreters of 
natural science. The Zuni Indians, for instance, and the 
Chinese, as Cushing and Purini have recorded, had each their 
peculiar and well-wrought-out view of the origin or develop- 
ment of man by evolution and adaptation. 

The Zuni legend of the Creation thus describes the condi- 
tion of men when they first emerged into the world of daylight 
from cave-worlds below (140, p. 383) : ' Men and the creatures 
were nearer alike then than now ; black were our fathers, the 
late-born of creation, like the caves from which they came 
forth ; cold and scaly their skins like those of mud-creatures ; 
goggled their eyes like those of an owl ; membranous their 
ears like those of cave-bats ; webbed their feet like those of 
walkers in wet and soft places; and, according as they were 

213 



214 THE CHILD 

elder or younger, they had tails longer or shorter They 
crouched when they walked, often, indeed, crawling along the 
ground like toads, lizards and newts ; like infants who still 
fear to walk straight, they crouched, as before-time they had 
in their cave-worlds, that they might not stumble and fall, or 
come to hurt in the uncertain light thereof.' The Zuni 
creation-myth looks upon the first men as like unto little 
children in their progress and development, who learned 
gradually through experience and the instruction of the 
gods. 

Evolutio7i Organic and Inorganic. — Sir Norman Lockyer, 
in his address ' On Some Recent Advances in Spectrum 
Analysis Relating to Inorganic and Organic Evolution,' looks 
upon ' life in its various forms on this planet, now acknow- 
ledged to be the work of evolution, as an appendix, as it 
were, to the work of inorganic evolution, carried on in a 
perfectly different way,' although there are innumerable parallels 
in the process (362, p. 107). The recent advances of spectrum 
analysis have established ' a quite new bond between man and 
the stars,' for 'not only. have we hydrogen, oxygen and nitro- 
gen among the gases common to the organic cell and the 
hottest stars ' — the beginnings of organic and of inorganic 
evolution — but chloride of sodium, sodium, carbonic acid, 
calcium, magnesium and silica. By the working over and 
over again of this primitive material higher and higher forms 
are produced, dissolation leading to reproduction and evolu- 
tion. According to Lockyer, 'the first organic life was an 
interaction somehow or other between the undoubted earhest 
chemical forms,' and death (dissolution, destruction of parts 
or wholes) ' not so much a question of luxury for the living 
(Professor Weismann holds that " life became limited in its 
duration, not because it was contrary to its very nature to be 
limited, but because an unlimited persistence of the individual 
would be a luxury without a purpose "), as one of necessity in 
order that others might live ; it was a case of mors janua vitce.^ 
Very important in this connection was 'the presence or 
absence, in all regions, of an excess of the early chemical 
forms ready to be used up in all necessary proportions,' and it 
may be that ' the difficulty was much greater for land than for sea 
forms ; that is, the dissolution of parts or wholes of land forms 
proceeded with the greatest rapidity.' From the simple prim- 
ordial life-germs have proceeded, by ' a long series of modifica- 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 21 5 

tions, or transformations, or both,' the variety of Hfe on the earth 
to-day, and this organic evolution has been of such a nature that, 
' The individual organic forms need not continuously advance ; 
all that is required is, that there shall be a general advance — 
an advance like that of our modern civilisation — while some 
individual tribes or nations, as we know, stand still, or become 
even degenerate.' This general continuity is, in a certain 
sense, reflected in the life of the individual, for in it the life- 
history of the earth is reproduced. Sir Norman Lockyer 
assumes that Hfe on earth began with the common life-plasma, 
out of which developed, on the one hand, the algae-like 
first aquatic plants, and, on the other, the monera and 
amoebae, the first animal forms, while, in time, from the fishes 
were developed the amphibians and reptiles, from which latter 
came the birds and mammals, and, by continued evolution of 
the mammals, the anthropoids and man. Both inorganic and 
organic evolution have started from 'a stage of simplest 
forms,' and progress has been, in both cases, 'a growth in 
complexity.' 

Plant mid Afihnal Evolution. — The common life-plasma, 
from which, along two divergent lines, vegetable and animal, 
the development of life on the globe has taken place, w^as, 
probably, according to Professor L. H. Bailey, ' more animal- 
like than plant-like.' The mycetozoa of the zoologists, the 
myxomycetes of the botanist, organisms which 'at one stage 
of their existence are amoeba-like, that is, animal-like, but at 
another stage are sporiferous, or plant-like,' preserve, ' closely 
and possibly exactly, the stage in which this life-plasma first 
began to assume plant-like functions' (19, p. 453). Since the 
divergence 'the symbol of animal evolution has been bilateralism, 
and the symbol of plant evolution circumlateralism.' Plants 
lost bilateralism and concentration when they became, as Cope 
has it, ' earth parasites,' and in their search for food had to be- 
come centrifugal, abandoning the tendency towards ' the 
cephalic or head-forming evolution,' which materialised in the 
worms, creatures 'characterised by a two-sided or bilateral, and, 
therefore, more or less longitudinal structure,' and from which 
worm form ' all the higher ranges of zootypic evolution have 
sprung, and one is almost tempted to read a literal truth into 
David's lamentation that " I am a worm and no man." ' Pro- 
fessor Bailey prefers ' retarded evolution ' as better than Cope's 
'degeneracy,' or such terms as catagenesis or decadence to 



2l6 THE CHILD 

express the development that has gone on in the plant-world, 
but even such a term is hardly suitable, for ' plant types ex- 
hibit quite as complete an adaptation to an enormous variety 
of conditions as animals do, and there has been rapid progress 
towards specialisation of structure.' Nor has there been in 
the plant-world as a whole 'any backward step, any loss of 
characters once gained, any stationary or retarded periods.' 
The greater part of present differences in organism are 'the 
result, directly and indirectly, of external stimuli, until we come 
into those higher ranges of being in which sensation and 
volition have developed, and in which the effects of use and 
disuse, and of psychological states have become increasingly 
more important as factors of ascent.' In other words, heredity 
itself is 'an acquired character, the same as form or colour 
or sensation is, and not an original endowment of matter ' ; the 
power to transmit hereditarily ' did not originate until for some 
reason it was necessary for a given character to reproduce 
itself, and the longer any form or character was perpetuated the 
stronger became the hereditary power.' The weakness of 
heredity is characteristic of the earlier forms of the life-plasma, 
and there is Uttle doubt of the general truth of the statement 
put forward by Professor H. S. Wilson, in his Geological 
Biology^ that ' mutability is the law of organic action, perma- 
nency the acquired law ' (19, p. 458). Mere growth, as Bailey 
points out, is variation and results in difference; plants, at 
least, ' cannot grow without being unlike,' and the power of 
growth is sufficient in itself ' to originate many and important 
variations in plants,' a view shared essentially by Cope and 
Eimer. The thesis of Professor Bailey's more recent study. 
The Survival of the Unlike^ is that dissimilarity of offspring, as 
compared with their parents, is a factor favourable to their 
survival in the world of life, i.e.^ dissimilarity or variability 
chiefly due to the action of the milieu and environment ('soil, 
weather, chmate, food, training, conflict with fellows, strain and 
stress of wind and wave and insect visitors '), the result being 
that ' there are as many species as there are unlike conditions 
in physical and environmental nature, and in proportion as the 
conditions are unlike and local are the species well defined.' 
The chief merit in the survivors being unlikeness, the fittest 
being really the unlike, Bailey proposes, in lieu of the ' survival 
of the fittest,' the expression the 'survival of the unlike,' as 
presenting in a new light 'the old truth of vicarious or non- 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 21/ 

designed evolution.' Nature's end, according to Bailey, is 
' perfect adaptation ' ; nothing is known to her per se, as 
species, or as fixed types, for ' Species were created by John 
Ray, not by the Lord ; they were named by Linneeus, not by 
Adam.' The unlikeness of plants enabling them to survive by 
entering fields of least competition, a phenomenon ultimately 
due to the plasticity of the original life-plasma, the influence of 
external stimuli, the growth-force and sexual mixing, is the 
greatest fact in the vegetable world. Such is, in brief, the out- 
line of the evolution of the present flora, from its starting- 
point in aquatic life. Longevity, winter quiescence, sizes, 
shapes and habits, have come by adaptation to conditions of 
life; 'the first plants had no well-defined cycles, and they were 
born to live, not to die ' ; death is not an inherent, but an ac- 
quired character of life-matter, ' a result of the survival of the 
fittest,' the sacrifice of some for others. A wonderful story of 
adaptation to environment and the survival of the unlike is 
contained in the history of the condition of the plant-world after 
the earth began to age and grow colder. Professor Bailey 
has, apparently, none too much sympathy with ' the attempt to 
evolve many of the forms of plants (spines, prickles, acrid 
and poisonous qualities, etc.), as a mere protection from 
assumed enemies,' and his statement that the original life- 
plasma was more animal-like than plant-like, is also in opposition 
to the majority of authorities who presume the derivation of 
animal from plant, and not the divergence of plant-life from 
something nearer the animal. 

Mammalian Evolutiofi.—D2ixWm, after a most rigorous and 
extensive investigation of the phenomena of animal life and 
variation, came to the conclusion that ' man is the co-descend- 
ant with other mammals of a common progenitor,' and still 
'bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly 
origin.' And, in spite of the efforts of naturalists like Wallace 
to declare that the mind of man is of a different order of descent 
than that of his body, the general results of the researches 
in comparative animal and human psych ologfl^ since Darwin's 
time are to proclaim for his intellectual endowment the same 
lowly origin, traces of which yet linger in his feelings and 
thoughts, his instincts and his emotions. But w^hile it is 
certain that man is the highest product of incalculable ages of 
vital evolution, and that he springs, physically and mentally, 
from the animal kindred beneath him, proof of such kinship 



2l8 THE CHILD 

being fairly abundant, the steps of his genealogy have some of 
them, notwithstanding the exact enumeration of Hseckel, yet 
to be made out, while dogmatism about some others is scarcely 
justifiable. 

The ancestor of man and the other mammals, 'the pro- 
mammal,' must have been, according to Professor Osborne,^ 
' a small terrestrial animal, either insectivorous or omnivorous in 
its habits.' Osborne emphasises the importance of ' the law of 
adaptive or functional radiation, whereby mammals have re- 
peatedly diverged from small unspecialised focal types into 
aquatic, arboreal, volant, herbivorous and carnivorous orders.' 
It would also appear that just at present the evidence points 
to the derivation of all aquatic types out of land types, the 
former being secondary. 

Professor O. C. Marsh, the eminent American palaeon- 
tologist, expressed himself thus ^ concerning the origin of 
mammals : ' The birds, like the mammals, have developed 
certain characters higher than those of the reptiles, and thus 
seem to approach each other. I doubt, however, if the two 
classes are connected genetically, unless in a very remote way. 
Reptiles, although much lower in rank than birds, resemble 
mammals in various ways, but this may be only an adaptive 
likeness. Both of these classes may be made up of complex 
groups only distantly related. Having both developed along 
similar lines, they exhibit various points of resemblance that 
may easily be taken for indications of real affinity. In the 
amphibians, especially in the oldest forms, there are hints of a 
true relationship with both reptiles and mammals ' (406, p. 409). 
Professor Marsh is, therefore, led to think that ' in some of the 
minute primitive forms, as old as the Devonian, if not still 
more ancient, we may yet find the key to the great mystery of 
the origin of mammals.' 

It is in the light of such statements that we should read 
Hseckel's scheme of the genealogy of man, in so far as the pre- 
human and pre-anthropoid stages are concerned, for there are 
many links that cannot yet be filled to a certainty. Dubois's 
discovery in 1891, in a river-deposit of Java, of the remains of 
what he termed the Pithecanthropus erectus, seems to have added 
one new link to the chain which must ultimately be revealed 

1 Nature, Vol. LVHI. p. 427. 

'^ At the International Congress of Zoology (Cambridge, England), 
August 25, 1898, 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 219 

as connecting man with his precursors, and with their cognates, 
the anthropoids. 

Professor A. S. Packard, commenting upon the facts of the 
eUmination of countless tertiary mammals, the great progress 
of specialisation, and, in particular, the gradual increase in the 
size of the brain ('those of certain existing mammals being 
eight times as large in proportion to the bulk of the body as 
those of their early tertiary ancestors'), says (471, p. 321): 
'^^his, of course, means that animal shrewdness, cunning, and 
other intellectual qualities, the result of semi-social attrition 
and competition, had begun to displace the partly physical 
factors, and in the primates these may have in the beginning 
led to the appearance of man, a social animal, with the power 
of speech, and all the intelligent moral and spiritual qualities, 
which perhaps primarily owe their genesis to increased brain- 
power.' And so it came about that the final outcome of 
nebular, geological, biological evolution appeared in man, 
' whose physical development was practically completed at the 
beginning of the quaternary period, and whose intellectual and 
moral improvement have, as it were, but just begun.' The 
' capacity for progress,' which is the characteristic of man above 
all other creatures, has now become his chief distinctive mark, 
and writers like Novicow, in his discussion of the social 
struggles of the human race, can catch glimpses of a law of 
acceleration, a principle ruling in social phenomena, like that 
of Galileo in physics. But, as Darwin said, man 'bears the 
indelible stamp of his lowly origin,' and ever in the midst of 
progress seem to surge up again the traits of his ancient kin. 

Atavism. — With the immense and varied ancestry man has 
had, and the infinitude of his connections with the rest of 
the animal world, — Gadow, in his classification of 'recent 
and extinct vertebrates,' admits 7328 species of fishes, 925 
species of amphibia, 3441 species of reptiles, 9818 species of 
birds, some looomammifers — atavism, 'discontinuous heredity,' 
as Virchow terms it, or ' a modality, the generic form of which 
is heredity,' according to Dally, is a most interesting as well as 
difficult subject of investigation, one in which facts of exceed- 
ingly small importance may be excessively magnified and 
others of vital significance completely ignored, especially when 
the mental development of the individual and the race is added 
to the physical, and studied in all its ramifications. 

Wide Ra?i^e of Atavistm. — Na.turally enough, the physical 



220 



THE CHILD 



'atavisms' of man, those bodily resemblances to his remote 
ancestors, are the most striking. The great range of such 
possible 'reversions' (for it has been questioned whether 
many of them may be strictly so termed) may be seen from the 
following table, compiled from the data in Talbot's study of 
Degeneracy, and Demoor, Massart and Vandervelde's Regressive 
Evolution : — 





No. 


Characteristic 


Reversion, or Atavism to or towards 
Condition of 




I. 


Cyclopean Monsters 


Single-eyed sea-squirts (ascidians) 




2. 


Large Orbit (Eyes) 


Lemurs 




Tv 


Supernumerary Teeth 


Lemurarius ; limnotherium 




4- 


' Hutchinson's Teeth ' 


Chameleon 




5- 


V-Shaped Dental Arch 


Reptiles 




6. 


Saddle - shaped Dental 
Arch 


Lower mammals 


i 


7- 


Thirteenth pair of Ribs 


Gibbon 


1 


8. 


Tail (caudal remnants) 


Monkeys below anthropoids 


* 


9- 


Supernumerary milk- 
glands 


Lemurs 




lO. 


Gout (liver, kidney) ■ 


Sauropsida 




II. 


Myx(jedematous skin 


Invertebrates 




12. 


Ichthyosis (skin) 


Fish 




13- 


S 3ina bifida 


Lower Fish 


>• 


14. 


Merycism (rumination) 


Ruminants 


'- 


15- 


Multiple Births 


Lower Vertebrates 



So77ie Physical Atavisms in Man and their Relations. — An 
excellent resume of the data concerning ' Atavism in Man ' was 
published by Dr Blanchard in 1885, and from his article and 
other more recent sources the following table has been com- 
piled, which contains some of the chief ' atavisms ' of a physical 
nature observable in the human race, and indications of their 
rarity, frequency, etc. : — 



No. 



Characteristic. 



Small cranial capacity 



Marked depressions 
on internal face of 
cranial vault 



Frequency, Rarity, Normality, etc. 



rare in tall human races ; more or less 

frequent in idiots, earliest known man ; 

normal in gorilla, chimpanzee, etc. 
rarest in white race ; more common in 

lower races of man, idiots, degenerates ; 

normal in most quadrupeds 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 22 1 



No. 



7- 

8. 

9- 
lo. 



14. 



16. 



Characteristic. 



Anterior commence- 
ment of ossification 
of sutures 

Persistence of frontal 
suture 



Interparietal (epactal) 
bone 



Reversed pterion 



Divison of temporal 
bone 

Persistence of mas- 
toiclo-temporal sut- 
ure 

Basiotic (inter-occi- 
pito-sphenoidal bone 

Median occipital fossa 



Absence of nasal sut- 
ure 

Intermaxillary bone, 
OS incisiviun 



Styloid apophyses of 
vertebrae 

Simple apophysis of 
cervical vertebras 

Tail, caudal verte- 
brae, etc. 



Angle of torsion of 
humerus notably in- 
ferior to 160° 



Frequency, Rarity, Normality, etc. 



rarest in highest types of man ; more common 

in some lower races (Negroes, e.g.)^ idiots, 

degenerates ; normal in apes 
rarest in some lower races of man ; more 

common in highest races, most common 

in white females ; normal in human foetus, 

most mammifers 
rare in white adults ; more common in 

several species of monkeys, human foetus, 

ancient Peruvian and Arizonian Indians ; 

normal in the rhinoceros, some rodents, 

most marsupials 
rare in white race ; more common in some 

of the lower races of man (Negroes, e.g.) ; 

normal in apes 
rare in apes and man ; normal in vertebrates, 

except mammifers 
more or less frequent in man ; normal in 

horse, etc. 

rare in man (except monsters) ; normal in 
simoedosaurus 

rare in highest types of man ; more common 
in some lower races of man, degenerates, 
criminals, the gibbon ; very little devel- 
oped in gorilla, orang, chimpanzee ; 
normal in many mammifers 

rare in Europeans ; more common in some 
lower races of man (Hottentots, Bushmen, 
etc, ) ; normal in apes 

rare in adult man, older children, and 
many adult apes ; more common in human 
foeti, very young infants and apes ; normal 
in ornithorhynchus 

rare even in Negroes ; more common (rudi- 
mentary) on some vertebras in Hylobates ; 
normal in apes 

rare in white race ; more common in some 
lower races (Hottentots, e.g.); normal in 
anthropoids and other apes 

rare in adult man and anthropoids ; more 
common in young children, certain East 
Indian peoples ; normal in human em- 
bryos up to fourth month, many lower 
animals 

rare in white race ; more common in lower 
races and prehistoric man ; normal in 
anthropoids, monkeys, carnivora 



222 



THE CHILD 



17. 



19. 



23- 

24. 

25- 

26. 

27. 

28. 
29. 



Characteristic. 



Olecranic perforation 
of humerus 

Great toe shorter than 
other toes 

Prehensile foot ; wider 
space between first 
two toes 

Exaggerated develop- 
ment of canine teeth 

Division of left lobe 
of liver, lobidus cau- 
dattis 

Lobus impar at base 
of right lung 

Disposition of hair on 

arms 
Hypertichosis univei'- 

salis 



Absence of lobule of 
ear 

Ability to move the 
ear 

Lacrhymal caruncle, 
nictitating mem- 
brane of eye 

Multilobate or separ- 
ate kidney, Wolffian 
body 

Retention of testicles in 
abdomen, cryptor- 
chidia 

Hypospadias, imper- 
forate, posteriorly 
furrowed penis 

Bifid gland, bifid penis 
(anteriorly) 

Exaggerated develop- 
ment of labia 
minora (female 
genitals) 



Frequency, Rarity, Normality, etc. 



rarest in white race ; more common in lower 
races and early man ; normal in anthro- 
poids and certain other monkeys 

rare in white race ; more conimon in lower 
races of man, human embryo ; normal in 
anthropoids 

rare (except by training) in adult whites ; 
more or less frequent in young children, 
some East Asiatic peoples — Chinese, 
Japanese, Negroes ; normal in anthropoids 

rarest in white race ; more common in lower 
races (Australians, Melanesians, etc.) and 
prehistoric man ; normal in apes 

more or less frequent in man, orang, chim- 
panzee, gibbon : normal in gorilla, some 
gibbons, other monkeys, other mammifers 

not very rare in man ; more common in 
lower races, human monsters ; normal in 
quadrupeds 

normal in man, anthropoid apes, some 
American monkeys 

rare in white race (except lamigo of embryo); 
more common in lower races of Eastern 
Asia ; normal in anthropoids, monkeys, 
other mammals 

rarest in white race ; more common in some 
of the lower races, idiots, cagots ; normal 
in apes 

not exceedingly rare in man — rarest in the 
white race ; normal in quadrupeds 

very rudimentary in white race ; often ex- 
aggerated in some lower races of man ; 
normal in fishes, sauropsidians (except 
ophidians), many vertebrates 

not very rare in man ; normal in ophidians 
and birds (embryo) 

not very rare in man ; normal in monotremes, 
cetaceae, pinnipeds, elephants, etc. 

rare in man ; normal in certain reptiles 
(crocodile, etc.) 

rare in man ; normal in monotremes, very 
many marsupials 

rarest m white races ; more common in some 
lower races (Bushmen, Hottentots) ; 
normal in certain anthropoids, chim- 
panzee especially 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 



No. 


Characteristic. 


Frequency, Rarity, Normality, etc. 


33- 

34- 


Double Uterus, double 

vagina 
Bilobate placenta 


not extremely rare in woman ; normal in 

most marsvipials 
rare in woman ; normal in Old World 

monkeys 



' Rudimentary ' Orga?is. Regressive Evolution. — The so- 
called ' reduced ' or ' rudimentary ' (for the two words are 
synonymous with some writers) organs of man are very 
numerous. Advance has been often, not by the development 
of new organs, but by the reduction of old ones, — in a sense, 
every progress has seen a regression. In his discussion of 
' Senescence and Rejuvenation,' and elsewhere. Professor C. S. 
Minot emphasises the evolutionary r^/(? of the loss of characters. 
Evolution 'depends not only on the acquisition of new 
characteristics, but also very largely on the loss of character- 
istics ; this loss, exemplified in the gill cleft and arches of the 
higher vertebrates, affects the early embryonic stages, appar- 
ently to allow the embryonic material to undergo a new 
development.' 

In the course of phylogenetic evolution all organisms have 
suffered the loss of some organ or other; the lost organ 
persisting sometimes in a reduced' state in the individual 
members of the species, or being found in organisms which 
are considered ancestors of those not possessing it. The 
widespread character of this ' survival of reduced organs ' is 
emphasised by Demoor, Massart and Vandervelde, in their 
account of regressive evolution in biology and sociology, etc. 
In man, among other ' reduced organs,' we have the hair on 
the surface of the body (which shows, however, sporadic 
increase), the last molar (indeed, according to Hertwig, all 
the teeth, part of the tegumentary system, are only the spine- 
scales of the rays introduced into the buccal cavity) ; the 
terminal epiphyses of the vertebrae (characterising certain 
mammals in youth, though lost in the Sirenians) ; the cervical 
vertebrae (more numerous and functionally important in the 
crocodile, e.g.) ; the coccyx (the remnant of the tail, so 
enormously developed in certain of the vertebrates) ; the 
little horns of the hyoid bone, the coracoid apophysis, the 
inter-clavicular ligament, etc. ', the muscles for raising the 



^24 THE CHILD 

skin, the muscles of the outer ear and the motor muscles of 
the tail (well developed in most of the mammifers), the intra- 
acetabular (contained in the cotyloid cavity) part of the deep 
flexor toe-muscle (which though existing in a functional state 
in certain animals, young ostriches, e.g.^ has completely 
disappeared in the orang-outang) ; the pineal gland (last 
relic of a formerly functioning visual organ), Xh^filum terminale 
of the spinal marrow (continuing the spinal marrow to the 
end of the coccyx) ; the coecum and the vermiform appendix 
(functional in the ruminants), the valvules of the intercostal 
veins (destined to indirectly favour the ascent of blood by 
preventing its fall, in the quadrupeds, with whom the inter- 
costal veins are vertical, not almost horizontal as in man) ; the 
nose (a reduced organ of Jacobson) ; the reduced third eyelid ; 
the Darwinian tubercle on the ear (the relic of an ancestral 
long and pointed ear) ; the Wolffian body (a primitive kidney), 
the epidydymus, the organ of Rosenmiiller, the vas aberrans, 
etc. Besides these reduced physical organs, the authors note, 
we have num.erous survivals of reduction in the social organism, 
even in the cities, civilisations, states and societies of most 
recent formation — religious, juridical, institutional, social 
survivals. Among these might be mentioned : circum.cision 
(as practised by American Jews) ; certain forms of salutation 
(in democratic countries) ; the Lord's Supper (in Unitarian 
churches) ; the calendar (the week and month names) ; the 
town-meeting (surviving in New Haven, Connecticut, alongside 
the city council) ; the mass-meetings (in Canadian towns and 
cities) ; birth, marriage and funeral rites and ceremonies ; 
political and regimental mascots and amulets of all sorts ; fast- 
ing and stated feasts ; marriage by simple consent (still legal in 
Scotland and New York) ; the subjection of women and the 
unequal privileges of the husband, etc. 

''Hydro-Psychoses'' — Water-atavisms. — In his paper on 
' Hydro-Psychoses,' Dr F. E. Bolton brings together some of 
what he terms ' the abundant proofs of man's pelagic ancestry ' 
— the vestigial and other characters, which, as Drummond says, 
' smack of the sea,' hints of the aquatic stages, from the earliest 
water life to the ' amphibian interlude,' which preceded his real 
land life. And an ' ancient and fish-like tale ' it is in many re- 
spects. Among the chief ' water-atavisms ' are the following : — 

I. The fish-like and amphibian-like appearances of the early 
human embryo — made much of by Drummond and others. 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 225 

2. Certain fish-like appearances of the brain of the human 
embryo in its early stages — emphasised by De Varigny. 

3. The fish-Uke type of the construction of the heart of 
the embryonic young of air-breathing vertebrates at a certain 
stage of their development — discussed by Romanes after 
Darwin, etc. 

4. The lungs of air-breathing vertebrates, which have super- 
seded gills, and are themselves the modified swim-bladders or 
floats of fish — as Darwin noted. 

5. The visceral clefts of gill-slits in the neck-region, dis- 
cernible in the human embryo when 3-4 mm. long, but 
beginning to disappear by the fourth week of foetal life — one 
of the first ' vestigial structures,' to be discussed, and productive 
of many extravagant theories. According to various authorities, 
the metamorphoses of these embryonic gill-slits have produced 
the thymus and the thyroid gland, the mouth, the olfactory 
organs, the middle and outer ear, etc. ; but a good deal of this 
is very doubtful. Children are born sometimes with the gill- 
slits, not only externally visible, a rather common occurrence, 
but open — while small openings in the neck, round patches of 
white skin, etc., may continue to mark the place of these clefts 
for a long time. The so-called ' neck-ears ' belong to the same 
class of anomalies. In their study of congenial affections of 
the neck and head, Lannelongue and Menard attribute many 
malformations of the ears and neck to the persistence of 
piscine or amphibian stages of development in the embryo (349). 

6./The hand of man, while in function one of the most 
highly developed of organs, is in shape and bones ' more like 
the primitive amphibian paddle than is the limb of any other 
mammal.' There is thus justification for the statement of 
Emerson, made, according to Moncure D. Conway (501), in 
the winter of 1833-1834, 'the brother of man's hand is even 
now cleaving the Arctic Sea in" the fin of the whale, and, 
innumerable ages since, was pawing the marsh in the flipper of 
the saurus.' Many anomalies and peculiarities of hands, feet, 
limbs and digits can be attributed to the fact that 'the 
human limbs are developments from the fin-folds as found in 
fishes and the human embryo' (625, p. 262). 

7. The swaying from side to side, and forward and back- 
ward, very noticeable in small school-children, and possibly 
other reflex rhythmic and oscillatory movements, may be 
'recrudescences of former aquatic life.' 

p 



226 THE CHILD 

t 

8. Many of the sensations had during sleep, — gliding, 

flying, hovering, swimming, floating, jumping, etc. — point, 
perhaps, to ancient aquatic existence, and are a ' faint, reminis- 
cent atavistic echo from the primeval sea,' to use the words of 
President Hall. 

9. The tendency of women to commit suicide by drowning 
(much more marked than in men), may sometimes be explained 
by ' a temporary or permanent suspension of control by the 
higher psychic centres allowing a recrudescence of the old love 
for aquatic conditions.' 

10. The extreme delight (after the shock of the first 
contact) taken by most babies in splashing and tumbling 
about in water, the keen joy of children in paddhng, splashing 
about, lying down in and capering about in water, the 
passionate love of bathing and swimming, and of being out 
in the rain, not confined to children and youth, but shared 
often by adults — all this suggests us one factor, at least, 'a 
survival of the old time life in an aquatic medium.' 

1 1. ^i The great r^/*? played by water in the primitive con- 
cepts of life everywhere in religion, mythology, poetry, 
philosophical speculation, child-lore, etc., suggests 'psychic 
reverberations ' from ancient physical facts. 

I Useful for comparison with these atavistic traits in man is the 
study of such creatures as have retrograded from land-animals 
into water-animals or are in process of becoming such : The whale, 
porpoise, dolphin, once quadrupedal mammals, but modified 
in form to suit sea-life and swimming, until they are very fish- 
like in appearance ; the seal, a carnivorous animal adapted to a 
life in the water ; the dugong and manatee ; the walrus, the sea- 
lion, the beaver, the South American web-footed opossum, the 
duck-billed platypus, the polar bear, etc., all show the modify- 
ing effects of a partial sea or water life. 

■^ In a very interesting paper on ' Survival Movements of 
Human Infancy,' Dr A. A. Mumford (451, p. 297) suggests 
the possible derivation from the movements and habits of 
man's aquatic ancestors, among other things of the following : 
(a) the ' paddle-movement ' of the hands of the waking child 
during the first three months of life — ' slow, rhythmical move- 
ments of flexion and extension occur, which, instead of possess- 
ing the quick, incisive character of voluntary movements, 
partake of the sluggish rhythm so familiar to the visitor to the 
tanks of an aquarium ; (d) the stroking (floor, table or other 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 22/ 

surface) movements, palms flat downwards, fingers directly 
forwards, as the young child when crawling. 

Monkey Atavisms. — The human infant, it will readily be 
seen, may start in Ufe with not a few reminiscences of the 
pathway over which the race and animal-kind have travelled, 
some of which he is sure to lose ere he comes into the estate 
of mankind. It is with considerable justice, then, that Mr S. 
S. Buckman, in his entertaining studies of ' Babies and 
Monkeys ' (89, p. 372), plays havoc with the fond delusion of 
parents, nurses, and visitors, that the infant is the ' very image ' 
of its father or its mother, a statement which is ' a gross libel, 
sometimes on the baby, sometimes on the parent.' It is, 
indeed, hard to believe ' that the small-jawed, long and promi- 
nent-nosed individual, with high forehead, was, in babyhood, 
prognathous, short and snub-nosed, with a remarkably receding 
forehead,' for the differences between the baby and the adult, 
in the human race, are often 'greater than the differences 
between some species of animals.' The mother is sometimes 
nearer the mark, when she styles her offspring 'little monkey,' 
and the pet and scolding names of children all over the world 
run in like direction and give, as it were, evidence of an 
unconscious belief of the animal resemblance and brute 
ancestry of the human young. A curious list of such appella- 
tions is given by President Hall, in his paper on ' Some 
Aspects of the Early Sense of Self (275, p. 368). 

Among the bodily characteristics which smack of the 
monkey in the human child, Mr Buckman notes the following : — 

li Nose. — The word swtta (whence our ' simian ' is pro- 
bably derived from the Latin simus, Greek 6if/^6g, ' flat or snub- 
nosed.' 2. Furrow below nose in upper lip, often persisting 
noticeably in adults, but very marked in babies and young 
children (relic of a divided lip lower down in the animal scale), 
more noticeable in the lemurs than the platyrrhine monkeys, 
and seemingly not present in the catarrhines. 3. Pouch-like 
cheeks of baby (well seen in the cherubs of art), recalling the 
food-pouches of the Cercopithecus. 4. Rudim.entary tail and 
depression (so hard to wash in children) at base of vertebral 
column, — ' the tail used to protrude there once ' (compare the 
large tail-mark in the adult gorilla). 5. The greater develop- 
ment of arms than legs (adapted for sustaining the body and 
for swinging). 6. Practical nonuse of thumb (monkeys use it 
very Httle). 7. Movements and use of foot. 8. Growth of 



228 THE CHILD 

hair on child's head from crown to forehead, as in Cebus 
vellerosus (in a flow of rain the head hung down and hke 
motions encouraged the growth of the hair in that particular 
way). 9. Direction of hairs on arms ('rain-thatch'). Dr J. O. 
Quantz, in his essay on ' Dendro-Psychoses,' gives a summary of 
the arguments favouring the arboreal ancestry of man, and Dr 
Mumford, in his ' Survival Movements of Human Infancy,' 
traverses some of the same ground. 

In his study of ' Some Aspects of the Early Sense of Self,' 
President G. Stanley Hall enumerates the following atavistic 
or pseudo-atavistic peculiarities in very young children : — 

1. Finger-movements resembling, on the one hand, the 
counting and tallying methods of primitive man, and, on the 
other, the recrudescence of these in arithmomania. 

2. Clutching and clinging with convulsive intensity to the 
hair or beard of adults, suggesting ' the obvious atavistic rela- 
tion to the necessity for anthropoids of arboreal habits to cling 
to the shaggy sides of their parents.' 

3. Marked tendency to pull out their hair, ' as if by some 
trace of the atavistic instinct which has caused the depilation 
of the human body.' 

4. Biting their own flesh or the flesh of others, their toys, 
etc., in anger, suggesting ' that along with the teeth there is also 
growing the strong psychic disposition to use them as primitive 
animals do theirs.' 

5. Acts connected with the excretions of bladder and bowels, 
suggesting ' many scatological rites of savages.' 

6. The persistent denudation and stripping off of clothing 
— ' morbid and atavistic' 

7. Fear of strangers, especially those with too unusual 
dress, features, acts, etc. — ' owing, perhaps, to some reverbera- 
tions of the ancient war of all against all in the long and bitter 
struggle for existence.' 

Among the movements noted by Mr Buckman as evidences 
of the anthropoid ancestry of man, as atavisms in the human 
child, are the following : — 

I. In grasping, e.g., a glass or a flower-pot, the infant (not 
using the thumb) seizes the rim between the fingers and palm. 
2. Ability to twist the sole of the foot sideways in a straight 
line with the inner part of the leg (characteristic of a tree- 
climbing animal). 3. Wonderful power of movement of toes 
together or apart. 4. Prehensile power of toes. 5. Predilec- 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 229 

tion for rocking in cradle and similar movements (reflex of 
swaying to and fro of tree-branches). 6. Climbing instinct of 
boys, and 'the insane desire to climb upstairs,' so common in 
young children. 7. Bow-leggedness of children learning to 
walk (advantageous position for tree-climbing), with this may 
be connected 'the ease with which bicycle-children get bow- 
legged.' 8. When child first stands up the outer part of the 
foot is put on the ground, the toes turned in, heel not touching 
the ground (heels of monkeys do not touch branch in walking, 
etc.). 9. 'Sitting on heels.' 10. Instinctive stealing and 
seizing things. 11. 'Taking things to bed,' — with some young 
children the bed is a sort of museum. 12. Putting between 
legs articles which are sought to be taken away by others (a 
monkey habit). 13. Picking at anything loose, e.g., wall-paper, 
to tear it off, 'survival of bark-picking in search of insects.' 
14. Picking parasites off one another. 15. Fondness of 
children for rolling (ancestors got rid of parasites in that 
way). 16. Scratching of head (monkeys notoriously infected 
with parasites). 17. Thumb-sucking in childhood, pencil- 
sucking in later life (also cane-sucking of ' dudes ' and 
'mashers'), and sucking of various objects by adults of one 
or of both sexes (monkeys' food is largely of a nature to en- 
courage sucking). 18. Exposure of canine teeth in anger, etc. 
(monkey ancestors fought with one another). 19. Instinctive 
fear-movements at sight of snakes (snakes are the great enemy 
of monkey young). 20. Mobility of facial expression. 21. 
Movements of nose and nostrils. 22. Elevation of eyebrows 
and like gestures. 

T::'The 'chnging power' of infants was discussed in 1891 by 
Dr Louis Robinson, in his article ' Darwinism in the Nursery.' 
Dr Robinson found that of sixty children less than one hour old, 
all but two were able to sustain the whole weight of the body 
at least ten seconds, while twelve held on for half a minute, and 
three or four for nearly a whole minute — nearly all at the age 
of four days being able to hold themselves suspended for half 
a minute. When two or three weeks old, children showed a 
maximum clinging power (one and a half minutes, two minutes, 
two minutes and thirty-five seconds — the last in the case of a 
child three wrecks old). It was also noted that one child, who 
had let go with his right hand, continued to sustain his weight 
with the left alone for five seconds. In the opinion of Dr 
Robinson, Dr Quantz, and other recent observers and writers, 
this seemingly purposeless possession of extraordinary strength 



230 THE CHILD 

in infants ' goes to show that our ancestors were tree-dwellers, 
and that the children clung to their mothers whose hands were 
occupied in climbing from branch to branch. Young apes, as 
a rule, hang beneath their mothers, holding on by the long 
hairs of their shoulders and sides. Those that failed to do this 
would tumble to the ground or be left behind, and fall a prey 
to enemies from which the mothers were fleeing. Hence, 
natural selection would bring about a high degree of this 
clinging power' (452). 

These writers point out also that ' the reflex act of grasping 
an object which touches the palm can be of no value to the 
child now, except to point to a former period when life itself de- 
pended upon it ' ; that predominant hand-use by man's arboreal 
ancestor is indicated by 'the child's employment of only its 
hands in the first stages of creeping, while the feet are dragged 
behind ' ; that the child's method of grasping an object, taking 
it between fingers and palm, not putting the thumb on the 
opposite side, recalls the fact that man's arboreal ancestors in 
going from bough to bough would strike the branches palm 
first from above downward, grasping with the fingers ' ; that 
the frequent inability of children under six or seven years of 
age ' to extend the hand perfectly straight ' is a result of ' thou- 
sands of years of bough-grasping.' 

\ In connection with Dr Robinson's observations, M. J. 
Vallot ^ maintains that there is often a difl'erence between 
children and monkeys in the manner in which they support 
their weight by the strength of arms and fingers : ' Children 
seize the branch to which they cling by applying the thumb to 
the index finger, while monkeys apply it on the other side, so 
as to hold the branch completely between the thumb and the 
other fingers. This manner of holding oneself suspended 
without opposing the thumb persists in man, and it is in this 
fashion that all children suspend themselves when learning 
gymnastics until the teacher has taught them the opposition 
of the thumb.' 

The fact that in man (and not in monkeys) there is a con- 
stant curve of the fingers, the second and third phalanges 
presenting always a slight incurvation ; the second finger 
curves laterally toward the third, the fourth and fifth toward 
the third, and the third towards the fourth, is explained by 
Regnault ^ as a result of the different roles of the fingers in 
prehension with the monkeys and with man, and to the limited 
^ Rev, Scient., XLIX. p. 348. 2 ^^^_ Scient., 1894. 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 23 1 

Opposition of the thumb in the anthropoids, the monkeys' 
narrower hand also favouring the process. 

^ As 'psychic reverberations ' from the arboreal life of man's 
anthropoid ancestor, Dr Quantz enumerates, among others, 
the following (516, p. 461) : i. Instinctive fear of snakes and 
certain wild animals (the serpent, e.g.^ can climb trees). 2. 
Instinctive fear of lightning (some of this may be due to ex- 
perience of ages past — lightning being more liable to strike a 
tree than an open space). 3. Fear of high winds and other 
vyeather disturbances (especially dangerous to tree-dwellers). 4. 
Instinctive fear of falling (in arboreal life chmbing and falling 
were daily experiences). 5. Fear of strangers, 'hide and seek,' 
— these are of use in arboreal existence, where enemies are 
numerous and active. 6. ' Rocking to sleep ' and the lullabies 
connected with it are reminiscent of ' long ages of swaying in 
the branches of trees, which would be the natural accompani- 
ment of sleep, with creatures of arboreal habits.' 7. The 
extreme restlessness, spontaneity of movement, instinct for 
imitation, etc., of children resemble those of monkeys very 
much. 8. The physiognomy and actions of certain idiots and 
semi-idiots, ' very ape like.' 9. The widespread occurrence 
and persistence of 'tree-worship,' and the great role played by 
trees in religion, mythology, philosophy, art, etc., all over the 
world, and in the thoughts of children. 

/7 Atavisms of the Cave, — In his sketch of the ' Primitive Child ' 
(541), Dr Louis Robinson seeks to explain many of the 
physical and mental peculiarities of the infant of to-day from 
the inheritance of trials and characteristics developed under 
the stress of the environment of primitive life. Among these 
are : The rotundity of outline almost universal in very young 
children — young monkeys had to be rather spare so that their 
mothers might carry them easily about the trees ; the human 
child waxed fat in times of plenty, when food was abundant 
(so that when food was scarce and the parents grudged to their 
offspring the latter might Hve on), hence the voracity of the 
child (and its tendency to pick up everything and put it into 
the mouth — in earlier times the child had to get along with 
the debris of food on the floor of the cave and around the 
resting-places) ; infantile beauty, for in times of trouble and in 
flight the best-looking children would be snatched up and 
carried away ; the ' astonishing vocal capabilities ' of the 
modern infant, since it is a well-known fact that 'all young 
creatures, unless hungry, will remain silent for hours,' and, as 



232 . THE CHILD 

a matter of self-preservation, the infant human learned to cry 
and to howl, for purposes of food, and to prevent being over- 
looked. Moreover, in primitive times, the squealing of infants 
(like the barking of dogs to-day) contributed to vigilance on 
the part of the primitive community. Fear of strangers, terror 
of wild beasts, fear of the dark, jealousy (the primitive child 
had often a very hard time to get anything to eat), and 
many other peculiarities of the modern child had their origin 
in the facts and necessities of the environment of the earliest 
men — indeed, Dr Robinson holds that ' every trait, physical 
or moral,' of the young human being can be traced back to its 
forerunner in the offspring of cave-man, and his immediate 
successors or predecessors, a statement which is perhaps more 
of a truism than an exaggeration. 

Interesting in connection with Robinson's views is Dr R. 
AV. Shufeldt's account of the actions of a Navaho Indian child 
' not over ten months old,' at Fort Wingate, New Mexico, whom 
he sought to photograph. The way in which the infant 
'watched every movement,' without a cry, hid behind the 
sage-bushes, peered through the leafless twigs, crouched down, 
' looked, for all the world, the young Indian cub at bay, with 
all the native instincts of his ancestors on the alert, and making 
use of all the stratagem his baby mind could master,' ran from 
bush to bush ('taking advantage of everything that lay in the 
short intervening distance'), and finally 'stood up to the full 
extent of its baby height, and giving vent to a genuine infantile 
bawl, made a break for the final point of its destination,' is 
very suggestive. Dr Shufeldt arrives at the conclusion that : 
' The native instincts of these American Indians are exhibited 
in their young at a wonderfully tender age ; and in this par- 
ticular they differ vastly from our own children at a corre- 
sponding time of life, and, reared as they have been for ages, 
in a civilised environment ' (592). We lack, however, reliable 
studies on this point. 

Dr Frank Baker, in his vice-presidential address before the 
Anthropological Section of the American Association for the 
Advancement of Science, on ' The Ascent of Man,' enumerates 
some of the evidences of progress the body of man contains in 
itself, 'indications of the pathway by which humanity has 
climbed from darkness to light, from bestiality to civilisation, 
relics of countless ages of struggle, often fierce, bloody, and 
pitiless' (21, p. 299). Some few of the changes and variations 
incident to man's upward climb from quadruped to man are 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 



233 



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234 THE CHILD 

Some of the effects of the rearrangement of man's body 
and its organs consequent upon the assumption of the erect 
posture, as given by Baker, are grouped below : — 

Vascular System, — Evidence of prior adaptation to quadru- 
pedal position — {a) several great trunks {e.g.^ great vessels of 
the thigh, forearm, ventral wall) are comparatively exposed. 
In an animal 'it is scarcely possible to injure a vessel of any 
great size without deeply penetrating the body, or passing 
quite through a Hmb ' ; this is because, ' by constant selection 
for enormous periods of time, the vessels have become located 
in the best protected situations ' ; {b) The vertical position of 
man does not, as does the horizontal, ' favour the easy flow of 
blood to the heart without too greatly accelerating it,' — the 
, valves of the veins are arranged for a quadrupedal position.' 
//As a result of the assumption of the vertical posture by man, 
' we have, connected with his vascular system, congestion of the 
liver, cardiac dropsy, tendency to fainting or syncope with 
lessened heart-action, varicose veins, varicocele, haemorrhoids, 
etc. 

Viscera. — {a) The liver in man depends nriore and more 
from the diaphragm, not. hanging suspended from the spine as 
in quadrupeds, and the diaphragmatic connections in man are 
such that the ' liver hangs in effect suspended from the top of 
the thorax and the base of the skull ' ; {h) the gall bladder in 
man and the urinary bladder are less advantageously situated 
for discharge; {c) in man the coecum, with its vermifonri ap- 
pendix, is not, as in the quadrupeds, so placed ' that the action 
of gravity tends to free it from foecal accumulations'; {d) the 
ascending colon is ' obliged to lift its contents against gravity ' 
in man. As results of the assumption of the erect posture, 
we have here : Calculus and bladder diseases, appendicitis, 
torpidity (with a lowered state of the system) of function in 
the colon, gall-stones, restricted diaphragmatic and pulmonary 
action, imperfect aeration of the blood, etc. 

Pelvis. — {a) In quadrupeds the pelvis is suspended from 
the horizontal spine by means of a strong elastic suspensory 
bandage of fascia, the tunica abdomi?talis, of which in man the 
part near the thorax, being useless, has ' entirely disappeared,' 
while ' in the groin it remains to strengthen the weak points 
where structures pass out from the abdominal cavity ' ; {b) in 
the animals there is no such great distinction between the male 
and female pelvis as exists in the human being, for, in the 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 235 

quadruped, ' the act of parturition is comparatively easy, the 
pelvis offering no serious hindrance,' while in the human female 
' the shape of the pelvis is the result of a compromise between 
two forms — one for support, the other for ease in delivery ' — 
thus the human pelvis has become more fixed and dish-like in 
shape, being most characteristic in woman, where it 'must 
bear the additional weight of the pregnant uterus.' As results 
of the assumption of the erect posture, we have here : Hernia, 
uterine displacement, etc., deaths in child-birth (the size of the 
head has gradually increased) ; woman has suffered from these 
peculiarities much more than man. 

Muscular Afio??ialies. — The muscular anomalies of the 
human body — in the human foetus and in the child at birth 
there are very many anomalies of this sort which have almost 
or completely disappeared in adult age — have been recently 
studied in great detail by Le Double and Testut. The latter 
holds that every abnormal disposition of muscle in man ' cor- 
responds, perfectly or imperfectly, to a disposition which was 
normal somewhere in the zoological series ' — the carnivora, the 
rodentia, the edentates, the didelphians, even the lower verte- 
brates, etc. Among other curious facts, Testut notes that 
feeble individuals with delicate muscles and bones seem to 
present about as many anomahes as those possessing a strong 
skeletal and a vigorous muscular system. Le Double, who 
does not hold the atavistic theory of Testut, distinguishes from 
the atavistic, regressive, or theromorphic anomalies, those that 
are progressive or evolutive, and those that are merely mon- 
strosities or decidedly pathological. In man, the member or 
part most modified (the hand, as compared with the shoulder) 
appears to offer the most anomalies of muscular tissue. It is 
in the discussion of man's muscular system that the theory of 
atavism has been most misused. As Dr Frank Baker remarks 
(593, p. 127) : 'When Sutton suggests that the round ligament 
of the hip-joint is a survival of an insertion of a muscle found 
only in the lizards, and Waldeyer considers that certain fibres 
of the cihary muscle are vestiges of the Cramptonian muscle of 
birds, it seems to me that those eminent authorities forgot the 
extreme improbability of genetic continuation of structures 
between such widely different stocks, and through such in- 
numerable generations, they having, nevertheless, totally dis- 
appeared in intervening forms.' 

The Erect Position i?i the Animal Series, — Bipedal locomo- 



236 THE CHILD 

tion is not man's unique possession, for birds have it, monkeys 
approach it, and some reptiles, on certain occasions, use it 
almost to perfection. What Mr Saville-Kent regards as a most 
interesting case of the cropping out in the young of ancestral 
traits is seen in the bipedal locomotion — more manifest in 
young and slender individuals — of certain Australian and 
African lizards, who run across wide expanses of level and" 
smooth ground to the nearest water in bipedal fashion. This 
pecuharity, the author suggests, ' is inherited from a race that 
possessed yet more essentially bipedal progression.' ^ The 
bipedal progression of the Australian lizard, observed also by 
M. de Vis, has led Madame Clemence Royer to deny .the 
generally accepted genealogy of man through some form of 
anthropoid ape, tracing man and the apes of to-day back to 
pelagic forms of parallel but distinct development. An original 
difference of attitude led to man's upright and the ape's 
oblique position, while neither man nor ape has passed through 
a line of terrestrial ancestors who used the horizontal position. 
Both the pedestrian motion of man and the arboreal life of the 
anthropoids are siii generis^ and their common origins take us 
back to the movements and adaptations of sea-life. It must not 
be forgotten that the lizards noted by Mr Saville-Kent ' possess 
a relatively excessive development of the hind limbs,' and that 
the faculty of bipedal locomotion is most conspicuously pre- 
sent in the young and slender individuals ' — here, again, the 
young, whatever may be the reason, is father of the old. 

' . Bertaux, in his study of the humerus and the femur, con- 
cludes that the upper limb of man is no more typical than the 
lower, and the so-called torsion of the humerus is a phenomena 
of adaptation, that organ being not at all a ' turned ' femur. 
He emphasises the fact that, while in the monkeys all four 
limbs are more or less adapted to prehension, in man the 
difference of the two pairs of limbs is complete — two for pre- 
hension and two for standing and walking. Bertaux rejects 
the simian origin of man, preferring to derive him from the 
Eocene mammifers — Phenacodus primcEvus — w^hose anterior 
members were adapted for prehension and sustentation, the 
posterior being suited to walking (51), ,. 

Man as Biped. — Sir William Turner, the eminent anatomist, 
after discussing in detail many of the technical questions 
involved, comes to the following conclusion concerning 
^ Nahij-e, LVI. p. 271. 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 237 

the erect attitude of man (653, p. 4): 'Characters and 
peculiarities which appertain not only to the family of which 
the individual is a member, but also to the species to which 
he belongs, are conveyed through it [germ] from one genera- 
tion to another. Hence, as the capabiUty of assuming the 
erect attitude. and of thus standing and moving on two feet 
have been attributes of the human form since tiie beginning, 
there can be little doubt that this power is potential in the 
human organism at the time of birth, and only requires a 
further development of the nervous and muscular systems to 
become a reahty, without the aid of any special training.' He 
also observes further, in deprecation of the idea that to the 
fostering care of mother or nurse is due the assumption of the 
erect attitude by the young child : ' If one could conceive an 
infant so circumstanced that, though duly provided with food 
fitted for its nutrition and growth, it should never receive any aid 
or instruction in its mode or progression, there can, I think, 
be little doubt that, when it had gained sufficient strength, it 
would, of itself, acquire the erect attitude. The great growth 
in length of the lower limbs, as compared with the upper, 
would render it inconvenient to retain the creeping or the 
quadrupedal position.' Somewhat the same view is taken by 
^Professor E. A. Kirkpatrick,i ^]-^q holds that ' movements such 
as walking, that seem to be learned, are, in reality, largely 
inherited, and that other nervous and muscular connections 
are less a matter of experience than is usually thought.' In 
support of his contention Professor Kirkpatrick cites the case 
of a seventeen months' old child, 'that had never tried to 
stand or walk alone, who, upon seeing some cuffs on a table, 
crawled to it, pulled herself up, put on the cuffs, then walked 
and ran all over the house.' 

Origin of Erect Fosture.-^Dx Quantz (516, p. 455), citing 
Winwood Reade's statement that ' when the gorilla wishes to 
see more distinctly the approaching hunter, he rises to the 
upright position,' and noting the fact that not a few animals 
{e.g., monkeys, rabbits, etc.) also stand up to look at distant 
objects, concludes that 'the erect posture has been brought 
about chiefly perhaps through curiosity.' Quantz holds, with 
Drummond, that the erect attitude is a comparatively recent 
acquisition of man, as is proved by his inability to maintain it 
comfortably for any great length of time, his desire to rest by 
1 Psychol. Rev., VI. p. 153. 



238 THE CHILD 

sitting, and his even yet somewliat unstable equilibrium, his 
inability to stand when sick, etc., and, further, by the fact of the 
child's having to learn to walk, a thing which other creatures 
do at once (516, p. 456). But, as the author notes, the 
' bipedal balancing ' is the difficult thing, for children make ' the 
alternate movements of the legs long before such a movement 
is of any service,' just as the arms of a child make alternate 
movements when gently stimulated on the palms — these, the 
movements necessary to quadrupedal locomotion, seem to be 
inherited, but the bipedal gait is acquired by practice of the 
individual, not having as yet become instinctive. 

Baker, however, in his discussion of the evidence as to the 
nature and characteristics of 'Primitive Man' (22, p. 365), 
concludes, from consideration of the remains of the Pithecan- 
thropus erectus (a creature believed to be a type intermediate 
between man and his anthropoidal ancestors), that in all 
probability ' the erect posture was assumed much earlier than 
is commonly supposed.' Further, he thinks: 'It must have 
preceded the intellectual development, and perhaps have been 
one of the conditions that led to it. It is not until the erect 
posture is assumed that the thoracic limbs are freed from the 
duty of assisting in locomotion, and thus become adapted to 
higher uses. No animal that habitually walked on its hands could 
acquire the use of tools.' In a sense the brain has been shaped 
by the activities of the body, and there is much truth in Dr 
Baker's observation : ' The infant does not learn to walk because 
its brain teaches it to do so, but by experience and trial its 
hands and feet teach its brain that this is a more effective 
method of locomotion ; in this, as in so many other instances, 
the history of the infant recapitulates that of the race.' 

The view that the oncoming of severe cold in the northern 
hemisphere changed some arboreal anthropoid into the pre- 
cursor of man has been put forward by several writers. A 
glacial period of some sort figures conspicuously in the past 
environments of human and animal species, according to many 
authorities. Grant Allen, who holds that 'the tropics now 
preserve the general features and aspect of earlier times,' 
insists on the far-reaching effects of the ancient cold-wave.^ 
Then it was that the trees learned to shed their leaves, the 
birds to migrate, the insects to hibernate in egg and cocoon, 
the pigs to fatten against the frozen time, the moles to sleep 
over winter, the squirrels to hoard nuts, the frogs to go into , 
1 Pop. Sci. Mo., Dec. 1898. 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 239 

the warmer mud, the adders to coil up to sleep, etc. Man, 
however, he believes, is of ' pre-glacial ' origin subsequent to the 
old 'frozen time.' Haacke would have it that after the origin 
of warm-blooded animals, through the transformation of some 
reptile or amphibian — the first step towards the mammal — a 
glacial period caused these to assume a hairy coat, which 
most of their descendants still retain (202, p. 10). 

In his book on the origin and home of primitive man, Dr 
J. Miiller adopts and extends Wagner's theory of the coming 
of man. According to these writers, the rise from animal to 
human life really took place in the northern part of the Old 
World during the Ice Age. The anthropoid ancestor of man, 
on account of the lack of plant and fruit food caused by the 
glacial cold, left the trees, took to the plains and began eating 
flesh. Gradually he learned to hunt, and his practice in 
hurling stones led ultimately to the assumption of the upright 
position and walking on the hind-limbs only. He was, how- 
ever, helpless in many respects until he succeeded in manu- 
facturing artificial weapons, which assured to him the conquest 
of the rest of the animal world. Some such theory as this 
seems also to be entertained by Keane. 

Professor O. T. Mason, who has pubHshed a thorough- 
going study of ' Primitive Travel and Transportation,' observes 
that man is the only animal which ^ has succeeded in divesting 
the fore-limbs altogether of their primary function,' and in 
providing 'in the erect position the diversified requisites for 
the versatile walker and burden-bearer in one person.' In a 
certain sense, we may say that ' the erect position was effected 
by and through the carrying art' (412, p. 255). Anyone who 
has watched the movements of a little child, before it has 
learned to walk, cannot fail to have noticed the delight it 
takes in moving, lifting, carrying things with its hands long 
before it has attained to anything like the erect posture. 
Methods of carrying, indeed, have much to do still with the exact 
character of the erect posture — women, e.g., seem almost every- 
where to prefer ' toting ' or carrying on the head, men incline 
to the use of the shoulders or the back. Among some primitive 
peoples (certain North American Indian tribes in particular), 
the men preserve the upright figure and dignified bearing better 
than the women, who, through carrying children and numerous 
other heavy burdens, soon come to have the figure stooped 
and bent. But sometimes, on the other hand (among the 



240 THE CHILD 

Quiches of Guatemala, for example) it is the men who relieve 
the back pressure by a band around the forehead, and by 
bending forward to contract the crouching posture, while 
the women have a dignified bearing and more erect position 
due to their carrying burdens on their heads and on the out- 
stretched palm of the upUfted hand. These differing customs, 
we are told, begin in early childhood, and have an undoubted 
influence in shaping the figures of adult life (4 1 2, p. 477). Many 
of the most primitive methods and devices for carrying and 
transporting still exist in the midst of our modern culture as 
the nursery, the farm and garden, the docks and wharves, the 
streets and byways amply testify (412, p. 423). Children love 
to ride 'pick-a-back' as of old. Women persist in carrying 
their purses in their hands. The handkerchief slung on the end 
of the pole still met with in the pedlar and the tramp is age-old. 
The neck-yoke for carrying survives both in Old and New 
England, and the country boys and women use a hoop as a 
spreader when carrying tw^o pails of w^ater, while the two 
icemen in the great city who carry a huge block by both 
holding on the hooks and one pushing against the shoulder of 
the other for a brace likewise belong to primitive times. 
The waiter in our modern hotels who elevates the dishes he is 
carrying upon the palms of his hands had a fellow in Egypt 
thousands of years ago. The co-operative system of carrying 
in evidence at barn-raisings and picnics, shipyards and army 
manoeuvres, funerals and accidents is very ancient. The 
passage of buckets of water from hand to hand at a fire still to 
be seen even in civilised Enghsh-speaking communities, the 
transport of fruit and other merchandise in like fashion in the 
Southern States, and all other endless chain methods of trans- 
portation, find congeners in Hawaii and among the ancient 
Picts. The Irish milkmaid who crowns her head with her 
kerchief or a cloth, before setting her pail upon it, is not far 
from the Zuhi Indian with her carrying-pad. The device of 
sitting down to aid in receiving or adjusting the load is a 
familiar one to many primitive peoples. The canoe (and with 
it the modern steamship), the coffin, the cradle, the box of the 
waggon and sleigh all bear to-day traces of their common 
parentage in the hollowed log, the primitive ' dug out,' which 
once served all these purposes. The ' stone boat ' of the 
Middle and Eastern States finds its almost perfect fellow 
among the savage tribes of Siberia. The rude sleds of some 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 24I 

of our children to-day are matches for the simpler vehicles of 
many Arctic and sub-Arctic peoples. 

Right mid Left. — The assumption of the erect posture by 
man, according to Dr D. G. Brinton,^ who remarks that 'the 
anthropoids and other primates closest to man are ambidex- 
trous,' and that 'the aboriginal race of North America (and 
presumably other primitive peoples as well) was either left- 
handed or ambidextrous to a greater degree than the peoples 
of modern Europe ' (among educated Americans and Europeans 
2 to 4 per cent, are positively left-handed), entailed the pre- 
ference for the right hand noted in all parts of the world from 
the remotest antiquity, the difference in the distribution of 
arterial blood to the left brain and the right, occasioned by the 
new attitude being the immediate cause. But this is only one 
of many views as to the origin of right-handedness. Pro- 
fessor Mason,2 from the examination of stone scrapers, is led 
to conclude that ' qtwd sciam, no savage woman was ever left- 
handed,' a fact which would set woman in advance of man in 
even the most primitive times. Right-handedness and left- 
handedness, however, may be only one aspect of the general field 
of asymmetry in man, however originated. Professor J. J. van 
Biervliet, indeed, in his essay 'The Right Man and the Left Man,' 
based on extended observations and a survey of the literature 
of asymmetry in the human subject, comes to the conclusion 
that ' the normal man is asymmetric,' and that there are 'two 
normal types of this asymmetry — skeleton, muscular system, 
nervous system, senses, functions, etc., are all affected — the 
right man and the left man.' In the case of the ' right man,' 
all the organs, etc., on the right side of the body are better 
developed than those on the left in the proportion of 10 to 9 ; 
with the 'left man' the case is vice-versa. Many of these 
differences are slightly marked or do not occur at all in early 
childhood, not making their appearance till the age of fourteen 
or fifteen (52, p. 388), and the asymmetry in question 
seems not directly heritable. Occasionally there are cross- 
asymmetries. 

Dr van Biervliet inclines to seek the origin of this 
asymmetry in the facts of embryonal life, the development of 
the vascular system especially. The ' famous asymmetry,' of 
the criminal, according to Dr van Biervliet, loses not a little 
of its importance in the light of the facts adduced by him, as 

1 Afjier. Attthr., IX. p. i8i. ^ Avier. Anfhr., IX. p. 226, 

Q 



242 THE CHILD 

do also many of the discussions of the ' atavistic ' character of 
left-handedness, etc., for the normal 'left man,' while not 
nearly so numerous as the normal 'right man,' is remarkably 
frequent. 

According to M. Irwell/ the vocal organs of man and the 
apes are so similar anatomically that some special cause must 
exist for the appearance of human speech. This, he thinks, is 
correlated with the erect position so characteristic of man, and 
with his breathing. Articulate language, its beauties and its 
blemishes came when man 'stood up.' 

Ha?id-use — Manual Dexterity. — In the story of the use of 
the hand one may well recognise some parallelism between the 
development of the race and that of the individual. Good 
detailed studies of the use of the hands in the various activities 
of primitive peoples are rare, for there are as yet few Cushings, 
McGuires and other patient investigators of savage and bar- 
barous life. 

Mr F. H. Gushing, in his interesting account of the arrow 
and the activities connected with it, observes : ' There are three 
examples of the way in which awkward-handed, experienceless- 
minded beings began making (or, rather, using) things as tools. 
They are to be found in the acts of monkeys, imbeciles, or very 
young children. I have watched and experimented with all 
three studiously and long. If they would break a thing, they 
cannot — or at least they never do — dissociate the thing to be 
broken from the breaking of it. They hit it against something 
bigger.' Even the Tasmanians, Mr Gushing points out, though 
far above the monkey's or the infant's stage of art, ' still prac- 
tised edging their hard pebble-choppers by seizing them with 
both hands, the more accurately to direct them, and whacking 
them until chipped sharp obliquely against other stones, and 
in this they were, but a few generations ago, in the true 
Palaeolithic period of their development.' It marked a mighty 
advance in the intelligent activity of man when he changed 
from a mere user of tools to a maker of them — when the idea 
came to him to use the tool on he object, not the object upon 
the tool. The way of perfectibility was then opened for the 
tool and for all actions connected therewith. From the nut 
clasped in the hand and struck against the boulder to the 
implement fashioned to best suit the hand, and best break, 
split, cut or round the object against which it was employed, 
I Med. Rec, N.Y., p. '^';. 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 243 

was a step that marked the victory of intent over opportunity, 
of art over materiahsm of the rudest sort. 

/ Mr Gushing tells us further : ' There are three contemporary 
examples of the early use of a prod as a weapon — of at least the 
chase. These are : Bobby [monkey] again, young children, 
and (I say it not gracelessly) women trying to drive chickens or 
cattle or other frightful creatures.' The monkey tries to hit the 
cat, e.g., with a stick, ' never by actually throwing it, but by lurch- 
ing it forward with both hands, and as much with the body as 
with the hands and arms.' Moreover, says Mr Gushing, ' if you 
ever see awkward women or children after anything with a 
" sharp stick," you will observe that they throw it, if they can- 
not catch up, in much the same fashion — lurchingly, not over- 
hand, as a spear should be thrown, for that would discontinue 
the initial movement' (139, p. 328). 

J" The epithet ' two-handed,' which the present writer remem- 
bers from childhood as a synonym for ' awkward,' finds some 
explanation in these primitive modi operandi. Talbot says of 
a family reported by Gibney (625, p. 55) : 'All' [five] 'of the 
children and the grandchild are semi-ambidextrous to an an- 
noying degree ; all of the movements which they perform with 
one hand are simultaneously performed with the other hand. 
The girls are obliged to use only one hand when dressing 
themselves, or when cutting patterns, and hold the other hand 
down by their side, because the two hands perform the same 
movements at the same time, and would interfere with each 
other.' There are other data of similar import, and an 
interesting essay might be written on the awkward ambidex- 
terity of human individuals. 

A Mr J. D. McGuire, the author of several excellent studies 
of the arts of primitive peoples, controlled by experimental 
investigations, observes that it is only in rare instances that a 
long period of time could be devoted by savages under the 
stress of the exigencies of life to the completion of any article 
intended only for luxury or adornment, and that ' it is a safe rule 
to assume that no savage instrument ever required any consider- 
able time to complete ' (388, p. 670). The chief thing was to 
begin in the right way. Mr McGuire holds strongly the view that 
primitive implements and primitive artefacts were produced by 
primitive methods, and not by means of any wonderful ' lost 
arts ' and contrivances beyond the comprehension and skill of 
man to-day : ' If the tusks, teeth and " batons of command " 



244 THE CHILD 

of the caves ' [due to Quaternary man of the Palaeolithic period 
in Western Europe] ' are of the pure Stone Age, as they un- 
doubtedly appear to be, one may argue safely that primitive, 
implements were employed in making them, unless it can 
be shown that primitive methods would not accomplish the 
work ' (388, p. 626). Experimental research enables the author 
to state further : ' The habit of attributing great patience and 
indomitable will to savages who have performed some work 
which does not at first sight appear explicable by simple 
methods is due rather to poetic fancy than to a willingness to 
admit ignorance.' 

V Most interesting in this connection is Mr F. H. Cushing's 
account of his discovery of arrow-making; how as a boy of 
about fourteen he had experimentally learned how the Indian 
arrowheads and the implements employed in fashioning them 
were made and used, and ' had elaborated, from the simple 
beginning I have chronicled here, some seven or eight totally 
distinct methods of working flint-like substances with Stone 
Age apparatus, and subsequently found that all save two of 
these processes were absolutely similar to processes now known 
to have been some time in vogue with one people or another 
of the ancient world, and I confidently look to finding that 
the other two, and yet additional methods since experi- 
mentally made out, were somewhere followed by men before 
me' (139, p. 313). Mr Cushing's success (by reason of 
which he became an archaeologist and subsequently was 
called to the Smithsonian Institution at Washington) seems 
to indicate that the unaided efforts of children, rather than 
their parent or teacher-guided labours, are the lines in 
which the earlier achievements of the race are more liable 
to be repeated. 

Mr Walter Hough, who has investigated experimentally 
methods of fire-making,^ observes : 'There is a prevalent belifef 
that to make fire by friction of two sticks ' [presumably the first 
fire-apparatus] ' is very difficult. Such is not the case. The 
writer can make fire in ten seconds with the twirling-sticks, and 
in five seconds with the bow-drill. Captain John G. Bourke, 
U.S.A., furnishes corroborative testimony on this point, to the 
effect that the Apache can generate fire in less than eight 
seconds. Most tribes make fire on wood in less than two 
minutes ; if a longer time is consumed it is probable that the 
^ Amer. Anthrop., HI, p. 361. 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 245 

people under observation are not properly prepared, or are 
practising a waning art.' 

^-r The Ha7tdless and Limbless. — Man really astonishes his 
fellows sometimes by what he is able to accomplish when he 
possesses a human brain, but lacks one or more of the physical 
accompaniments of perfect manhood or womanhood. Man 
can come very near to being a monster, and yet live and move 
and have his being. 

To the young of man and other mammifers who are born 
with such teratological characters as give them a position inter- 
mediate between malformations and real monsters, Broca gives 
the name ectromelian (k/^ouw, ' I cause to abort,' and i^zkag^ 
' member '). Though the greater part of such beings are not 
destined to adult life, there is no doubt that, unlike ' monsters,' 
these ectromelians are perfectly viable, possess often a robust 
constitution, are fecund after their kind, and often attain to ad- 
vanced old age. In ectromeUans the shoulder and the pelvis, 
the two characteristic regions of the trunk-ends of the body, 
are most often nearly normal in their development, the mal- 
formation affecting only the free or exterior portions of the 
members. Sometimes the hand or the foot seems to be attached 
directly to the shoulder or pelvis, a condition of affairs recalling 
the seals (whence the term phocomelian), whales, moles, etc. ; in 
other cases the lower segments of the limbs are lacking almost 
entirely, being reduced often to mere round stumps (to these 
cases the name hemimelian, ' half-membered,' has been ap- 
plied) ; again, the abnormality of conformation may affect both 
segments of the limbs at the same time, reducing the members 
to mere appendices of the shoulder and pelvis — the complete 
type of ectromelians (82, p. 198). 

While 'monsters' die very shortly after birth, ectromelian 
infants (exempt in the majority of cases from serious anomalies 
of the trunk, and, especially, of the face) are strong and healthy : 
' In respect to intelligence, general health and strength of the 
muscles which they possess, they yield in nothing to individuals 
whose members are perfectly developed.' Those whose hands 
and feet are not entirely lacking acquire a surprising facility of 
movement by means of the stumps which nature has left them. 
Those armless and handless use their feet as organs of touch 
and prehension, and often reach great skill in the employment 
of a needle, a pen, or a painter's brush. Ketel, according to 
Camper, painted with his foot, and Ducornet, ' born without 



246 THE CHILD 

arms,' as he was surnamed, attained a high rank among the 
artists of Paris in the present century. Thomas Schweicker, 
although he was armless, ' cut his pen, wrote, drew and carved 
with his foot,' and Ledgewood (exhibited before the Anatomical 
Society by Broca in 1852), who had no other organ of pre- 
hension than a four-toed foot, could 'clothe himself, shave, 
write, load and fire a pistol, pick up a pin from the floor, etc' 
Moreover, he was able to scratch his head with his foot, and 
by placing a thread between his hps, could, unaided, thread a 
needle. To the ectromelians who are entirely limbless the 
mouth comes to be wonderfully serviceable, the teeth and the 
lips recovering, perhaps, some of their ancient skill and cun- 
ning in prehension and retention. 

According to Broca, abortion of the thoracic members 
does not at all affect the genital organs, the phocomele Duval 
(19 years old), e.g., possessing perfectly developed genitals. 
Ledgewood married, and his wife gave birth to a robust and 
perfectly well-formed boy. There seems to be, indeed, no 
direct proof of ectromelian heredity in man, which is in line 
with the general law that anomalies are less Hable to be 
transmitted by heredity (direct or collateral), the more serious 
they are — anomalies of the limbs, e.g., as compared with 
anomalies of the fingers and toes. 

The complete or almost complete abortion of the ab-" 
dominal members is, however, usually accompanied by an 
arrest of development of the testicles, which, remaining in the 
abdomen, do not produce spermatozoids ; though when only 
one of these members is affected by ectromely the descent 
of the testicles takes place regularly. 

Prehensile Foot. — At the other end of the scale from the 
ectromelians are those geniuses of the Terpsichorean art, 
whose hands and feet seem everywhere at once — those ancient 
ambassadors who expressed their message, as do to-day 
certain primitive peoples, by the dance, and not by oral or 
written speech. Here belong also the prehensile - toed 
Negroes, Chinese, Japanese, and other Eastern Asiatics, 
who — especially the trained gymnasts and others — perform 
wonders with their feet. As Carrara and Ottolenghi have 
shown, the greater space between the first and second toes, 
the power of separating them, and certain degrees of pre- 
hensility, are more marked in normal women than in normal 
men, while criminals, prostitutes, idiots, epileptics and other 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 24/ 

degenerates approach even more closely the condition present 
in the feet of the prehensile-toed among the lower races of 
man. Baker says (21, p. 305): 'It is quite possible to train 
the toes to do a certain kind of prehensile work, even to write, 
cut paper, and sew. A baby not yet able to walk can often 
pick up small objects with its toes.' If one compares 'the 
marks caused by muscular action on the sole of a baby's foot 
with those on the hand,' one will find ' distinct signs ' of this 
prehensility. These phenomena have been more recently 
discussed by Dr Robinson in his article on ' The Meanings of 
a Baby's Footprint,' in which many interesting facts are 
brought out, and comparisons made. The role of practice 
and training in prehensility is emphasised by Dr Quantz after 
Virchow (516, p. 454). 

In a sense, however, all civilised men, at least, are ectro- 
meHans, as the result of what has been termed ' supplementary 
organs of sense,' 'extra-organic evolution,' etc. 

Extra-Organic Evolution. — In the course of an interesting 
essay on 'Discontinuities in Nature's Methods,' Mr H. H. 
Bates, emphasising the substitution of psychical for physical 
evolution which has taken place in man, says : ' Modern 
locomotion is a true discontinuity in natural phenomena, 
judged by its results.' The plesiosaur and the dinosaur, the 
great ravagers of the sea and roamers of the earth, moving by 
their own immediate exertions, are gone, and man, in the 
steamer's cabin or the Pullman car, traverses the globe. 
Moreover, ' man does not inhabit them, as the hermit crab 
inhabits his foreign shell. He uses them, parasitically, as 
a means of locomotion.' From the fishes' tail and the birds' 
wing to the wheel, man's creation, is a great leap (41, 
p. 140). 

Drummond, in his Ascent of Man., has told in rather 
exaggerated fashion ' the forfeit man has had to pay for his 
taming ' — the way in which civilisation with axe and club in 
the beginning, and nowadays with spectacles, telescopes, 
microscopes, cameras, telegraphs, telephones, instruments and 
vehicles of all sorts, has ' supplemented the senses,' and sealed 
the doom of the further development of certain limbs and 
organs of the body. The real evolution of these human 
attributes to-day lies in their progress from the uselessness 
and weakness of the child to the functional use in men and 
women. Individual psychic and social factors are now more 



248 THE CHILD 

powerful than race-influences and the species-instinct once 
were. It is not now a case of an active young monkey climb- 
ing manward, but of a helpless little human reaching up into 
the fulness of human action and human thought. The dullest, 
weakest babe is, altogether, much more of a human being 
than is the brightest, strongest little monkey — they are akin, 
but not the same — and the child of civilised man is slowly 
but surely becoming, also, less of a savage with the lapse of 
years. 

' Expansion ' rather than ' degeneration ' is, perhaps, the 

right word here. Mr Drummond's suggestive remarks are 

enlarged upon by Dr Arthur Allin, in his paper on ' Extra- 

• Organic Evolution and Education,' and Professor Baldwin, in 

his Child aiid the Race, emphasises the tendency to inherit the 

social milieu and disposition thus constituted, while other 

more recent essays, like those of Papillault, give full weight to 

the social shaping of the organs themselves. As Bates 

/observes, 'the creative brain of man' has introduced 'a new 

I mode of structure and function, of utihsing a planet' (41, 

P- 139)? ^i^d the social mind of man, it might be added, has 

gone on improving and perfecting it. 

F(Etal Attitudes. — Forster, in his Life of Dicke7is, records 
Dickens's impressions of a girl of ten, who was born deaf, dumb 
and blind : 'The moment she is left alone (or freed from any- 
body's touch, which is the same thing to her) she instantly 
crouches down with her hand up to her ears, in exactly the 
position of a child before its birth. I thought this such 
a strange coincidence with the utter want of advancement in 
her moral being, that it made a great impression on me ; and, 
conning it over, I began to think that this is surely the invari- 
able action of savages too.' This 'foetal' position is, curiously 
enough, common in women under certain conditions. During 
the menstrual period young women, when not restrained by 
the etiquette of company, frequently adopt practically this 
posture. Dr Frank Baker also informs us that in uterine dis- 
placement (hardly known among quadrupeds), 'one of the 
most effective postures for treating and restoring to place 
the diseased organ is the so-called "knee-elbow" position, 
decidedly quadrupedal in character' (21, p. 311)- in which the 
body is supported on the elbows and knees. Havelock ElHs 
(183, p. 66) notes the 'numerous and marked advantages of 
this posture in the diseases of women,' as introduced by 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 249 

Marion Sims, whose discovery of this posture has been de- 
scribed as ' the turning-point in the history of gynaecology.' 
c-- The posture assumed by women just before childbirth is 
also of interest in this connection, the position, as can be seen 
from figures in the second volume of Ploss being often the 
foetal one (as far as practical) among primitive peoples. This 
posture is very frequently represented in primitive art. But, 
as may be seen from the historical study of Morgoulief (436), 
the position taken by the woman during childbirth varied in 
ancient times as much perhaps as to-day — lying, crouching, 
standing, sitting, are all modes of remote antiquity. Another 
posture, often evidencing atavistic peculiarities, is that 
assumed by the sexes when urinating (183, p. 61). A 
quadruped-hke form of coitus is said by some authorities 
to be found not infrequently among the lower races of man 
{e.g.^ in certain parts of Australia, Africa, etc.). 

That in sleep man tends to assume atavistic attitudes and 
postures is indicated by not a few facts. Not merely mentally, 
but physically also, man is in a ' reduced ' state when asleep, 
practically in some respects a savage, or an anthropoid. These 
topics have been exhaustively treated by Mme. de Manaceine 
in her work on Sleeps its Physiology^ Pathology^ Hygiene, and 
Psychology. Baldwin (23, 5), notes also the ' reversion to the 
child-type occasioned by hypnotism,' which sometimes involves 
attitudes and postures. Quantz again (463) remarks that : 
' The sleep of children shows physiological tendencies which 
suggest certain ancestral modes of life. Young children when 
left to themselves will naturally go to sleep on their stomachs, 
with their limbs curled under them, or often using one arm as 
a pillow, which is exactly the position adopted by orangs and 
chimpanzees.' West Indian mothers and nurses, we are told, 
lay children down in this way, and, as Robinson has remarked, 
' some savage tribes sleep with the head bent down upon the 
knees, just as monkeys do.' 

v Dr William Browning^ remarks concerning a gifted col- 
league, that he ' sleeps on his belly, but with the forehead 
resting on one arm.' The physician in question 'alleges that 
he thus imitates primitive man, since our wandering ancestors 
must usually have lacked pillows, and so have eked out a 
headrest with the arm.' Some people also ' sleep on the 
belly with the face turned to one side.' Dr Browning in- 
1 N. V. Med. Jour., LXIX. p. 636. 



250 THE CHILD 

forms us that the type of those who sleep with the head 
lower than the usual average is ' naturally more frequent in 
the sick.' 

The 'chin-knees' position is a favourite one in the dispo- 
sition of the dead among primitive peoples, although in some 
cases it may have been determined by the nature of the 
receptacle for the corpse. Savage and barbarian prepare man 
for entrance into the next world by arranging him much as he 
was before he entered this. 

Postures in Fatigue and Excitement. — Fatigue, as Tissie notes, 
sometimes induces atavistic attitudes and positions, so the 
tired individual of the higher race is often physically on a par 
with the individual of the lower. Fatigue, like age, mimics 
the past history of the individual and of the race. Excite- 
ment and emotion are also promoters of atavistic body actions, 
as the studies of the automatisms of actors, preachers, orators, 
etc., prove, while the higher mental processes among civilised 
individuals are often accompanied by unconscious, or semi- 
conscious automatisms of a physical or a physiological nature, 
once the regular companions of the less developed forms of 
such mental activities. Doctors Lindley and Partridge, in 
their study of ' Some Mental Automatisms,' suggest that the 
avoiding, or careful stepping on cracks, planks, etc., in plat- 
forms, floors, board walks, carpet-seams, shadows of electric 
light, bars of sunlight, gravel stones, water-ways, vacant places, 
door sills, registers, bricks, tiles, knots, furrows, nail-heads, 
etc., so common in children and by no means rare even in 
adults, may be ' the remnants of an ancestral foot-conscious- 
ness, once an important part of the psychic life, but now 
shrivelled up to insignificant proportions,' and not merely 
' associations built up in childhood by imitation, added to by 
folk-lore and games,' etc. (361, p. 52). The foot is not so 
much the ' wegweiser ' with us as it was with our ancestors, 
and even the extreme sensitiveness of the palms of the hand, 
no less than that of the soles of the feet in man to-day, tells 
one story of the struggle for existence. To be ' foot-sure ' 
was to survive, and keenness of foot, no less than fleetness of 
limb, won the day. The foot-play of children before they 
enter the water when swimming may also belong here with 
many other surviving ' feels ' of hands and feet. Nor far 
removed, perhaps, is the ' insane desire ' to touch everything. 
In the excitement of their contortions and dances, we are 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 25 1 

told (516, p. 465), 'the medicine-men and sorcerers among 
primitive people assume many ape-like attitudes ' ; indeed, 
religious ecstasy and the fervour of the dance originate similar 
phenomena all over the world, as the history of the saints and 
fakirs in all countries and all ages proves. And, quite at the 
other end of the scale, the modern systems of gymnastics 
have their atavisms, against which eminent authorities have 
protested. 

In his Physical Education of Youth {a,a,^, p. 150), Dr 
Angelo Mosso cites, somewhat approvingly, Lagrange's desig- 
nation of the German system as 'monkey gymnastics,' in 
protest against its employment of apparatus which compelled 
man to leave the ground and support the weight of the body 
with the arms. The great difference between the brain of 
man and that of the anthropoids ought to be our warrant 
against the routine-teaching of ape-Uke attitudes. Man has, 
indeed, no call to insure bodily and mental health by turning 
monkey. 

Much that is interesting concerning the relative verticality 
of the individual at various stages of his existence, of the 
sexes, races, social classes, etc., may be read in G. Delaunay's 
comparative biological studies (154, p. 47). Havelock Ellis, 
who cites Delaunay, says (183, p. 59): 'The apes are but 
imperfect bipeds, with tendencies towards the quadrupedal 
attitude; the human infant is as imperfect a biped as the ape ; 
savage races do not stand so erect as civilised races. Country 
people (even apart, according to Delaunay, from agricultural 
labour) tend to bend forward, and the aristocrat is more erect 
than the plebeian. In this respect women appear to be nearer 
to the infantile condition than men.' This holds, perhaps, 
even of quite primitive races. The degenerate, insane and 
criminal classes offer sometimes evidence of less humanness 
with respect to the erect attitude, but care is needed in this 
field. 

Many attitudes characteristic of apathetic states are, 
according to Fere,^ due merely to muscular weaknesses (though 
similar phenomena are sometimes present in the chimpanzee 
and other anthropoids), and cannot be considered atavisms, a 
view shared also by Nacke. Muscular virility may in like 
manner be justly held to account for some attitudes character- 
istic of activity, which have also been considered atavistic. 
1 Rev. de Med., i8q6. 



252 THE CHILD 

Swimming. — Did one not recollect the common jest at the 
expense of the sailor to-day, it would seem incredible that 
there should exist on the globe tribes of men ignorant alto- 
gether of the art of swimming. Yet we are told, ' it was the 
reproach of the Choctaws, living on the Mississippi River, that 
they could not swim,' and Dr D. G. Brinton says of the Tapuyas, 
a very primitive people of Brazil, that ' they manufacture no 
pottery, build no canoes, and do not know how to swim ' 
(75, P- 238). 

According to Dr Hyades, of the French scientific mission 
to Cape Horn,i it is a curious fact that the Fuegian men 
around Cape Horn cannot swim, although they pass a large 
part of their time in their pirogues ; but their women there, 
and everywhere on the coast, are skilled swimmers. They 
swim nearly as dogs do. The consequence is, that when a 
pirogue upsets — a rather common accident — the men are 
frequently drowned, while the women swim ashore. No 
explanation of this condition of things could be obtained, 
though one sarcastic Fuegian told Dr Hyades that only the 
women could swim, as they alone had breasts which w^ould 
float them in the water. It may be, however, that here 
Nature is really aiding the fittest to survive. 

Dr Fritjof Nansen, in his sketches of Eskimo life, declares 
that reading and writing have been introduced among these 
people 'at the expense of skill in managing the kayak (the 
characteristic Eskimo boat),' the number of deaths from 
drowning having largely increased since the introduction of 
the school and the church. It is often dangerous to attempt 
to teach an old race new tricks. In ancient Athens, however, 
children were taught to read and to swim, as two of the prime 
arts of social life, the lack of which relegated the individual 
to the lowest ranks (357, p- 436). 

With many savage and barbarous peoples all over the 
w^orld children of both sexes learn to swim well at a very 
early age. The Andamanese boys and girls are very good 
swimmers, learning almost as soon as they can run ; so also 
some of the Kootenay and other Indians of North America, 
who are very fond of the water. The Siouan Indians, accord- 
ing to Dr W. J. McGee,^ were, for the most part, ' fine swim- 

^ Hyades and Deniker's Mission Scientijiqiie du Cap Horn, Vol. W\. 
p. 214. 

2 Ann. Rep. Bur. Ethn., XV. p. 172. 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 253 

mers — men, women and children' — although they 'did not 
compare well with neighbouring tribes as makers and managers 
of water-craft.' Even among primitive peoples the best navi- 
gators are not always (perhaps not commonly) the best swim- 
mers. The natives of Tahiti, and other islands in the South 
Pacific, ' are fond of the water, and lose all dread of it before 
they are old enough to know the danger.' 

':>,Sir David Wedderburn ^ thus describes the bathing of the 
Maoris of New Zealand, ' a nation of perfect swimmers, the 
women no less than the men,' in the warm springs of the 
country : ' At sunset the whole population of a village, men, 
women and children, may be seen disporting themselves in 
the tepid depths, or seated, with the water up to their necks, 
on the smooth, enamelled sides of these natural thermae. 
Infants in arms bathe along with the rest, learning to swim 
before they are able to walk.' We learn also that in the 
Maori legend, corresponding to the classic tale of Hero and 
Leander, it is the woman ' who performs the feat of swimming 
over to the island of Mokoia.' 

j^The inability of man, as compared with the quadrupeds, 
to swim naturally and instinctively without previous training 
or effort, is a fact which Robinson, in his essay on ' Darwinism 
and wSwimming,' seeks to account for from the arboreal life of 
the ape-Hke ancestors of the race, and Quantz, who has inves- 
tigated the ' dendro - psychoses ' of the present sons and 
daughters of mankind, expresses the general opinion that ' the 
higher apes' dread of water and the loss of their abiHty to 
swim are no doubt the result of their life being exclusively 
arboreal' (516, p. 456). 

Mr Irwell points out that in trying to swim in deep 
water man moves one hand after the other, which he ought 
not to do, but which is just what apes do in climbing 
trees. Some primitiv^e peoples, like children, go even further 
back, and swim ' dog-fashion.' ^ As Professor O. T. Mason 
points out, most of the devices used by children nowa- 
days as aids to swimming have been exploited by savage 
and barbarous peoples (411, p. 333). The Indians of 
Labrador 'use little paddles to drag themselves quickly 
through the water ' ; Mexican, Peruvian and other tribes 
' tie bundles of reeds together as floats ' ; some of the 

F^n. Rev., XXVH. p. 801. 
Med. Rec, N.Y., LIV. p. 86. 



254 THE CHILD 

Indians on the Gulf of California 'lash two light bits of 
wood to a vine, which they place against the breasts, 
exactly after the manner of the cork life-preservers ' ; while 
Shakespeare's ' Httle wanton boys that swim on bladders ' 
compare wath the Assyrians of old, who ' buoyed themselves 
upon inflated goatskins,' and the Eastern Eskimo, who 'at 
times ride on the sealskin harpoon-floats.' 

Psychic Atavisms. — ' Psychic Atavisms ' — regressive pheno- 
mena of thought, feehng and action, considered apart from 
physical or anatomical atavisms — is the title of an extended 
essay by Professor Paolo Mantegazza, published in 1888, and 
the literature of this topic has increased vastly since then. 
By ' psychic atavisms ' (not necessarily teratological or patho- 
logical) the author means ' the sudden return in individuals of 
the higher races of man of psychic characteristics which pro- 
perly belong to his savage, anthropomorphic or animal ances- 
tors.' Such regressive mental phenomena may occur in at 
least two different ways, viz. — {a) by reason of a standstill of 
psychic development at the child-stage ; {b) by reason of the 
reappearance of atavistic qualities, which have skipped a 
number of generations, the appearance in an individual of 
qualities which for long years have been latent in the stock to 
which he belongs, but clearly characterise some of his more 
remote ancestors. Mantegazza accepts the view that the 
mental development of man, from childhood to adult age, 
runs through briefly the same stages which the race has gone 
through in the course of its development. For him the 
Australian aborigine represents man of the river-drift period, 
and is a creature 'with the intelligence and the feelings 
of a European child of to-day,' the only difference being 
that the savage adult remains fixed in the same stage of 
development, while the civilised child is capable of making 
psychical progress — a view not entirely justified by the 
more recent and searching studies of primitive tribes. The 
second form of psychic atavism is exemplified when children, 
whose parents are of opposite characters, manifest qualities 
altogether different from those of their immediate progenitors, 
but closely resembUng, or even identical with, peculiarities 
of ancestors much more remote, — this Mantegazza com- 
pares with the appearance of the blue feathers of the wild 
pigeon in the offspring of doves of differently-coloured 
plumage and of different race. Some of the principal 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 255 

' psychic atavisms ' noted by Mantegazza and others are 
as follows : — 

Alimentary Atavisms. — Alimentary atavisms appear, par 
excellence^ in the little child of the modern civilised races, who 
is vegetarian in his early years, delighting in all sorts of plants 
and leaves, fruits and berries, things sweet and sour ; it is 
only during youth that the individual man becomes carnivorous 
(in which state he continues through adult age). Not alone 
the predilection of the child for the products of the vegetable 
kingdom, but the efforts of parents to keep meat away from 
their young offspring, recall the fact that in the childhood of 
the race man was frugivorous, as many of the lowest known 
primitive tribes are still to-day. The predilection of all 
peoples, low and high, civiHsed and savage, for oysters and 
other mollusks in their raw state, may be termed a universal 
atavism, which records the fact that the race enjoyed a diet of 
raw, uncooked flesh before the invention of fire and the gradual 
rise of gentler instincts made the art of cooking possible. 
The influences of modern civilisation are, however, rapidly 
creating in the child of to-day appetites for cooked and pre- 
served meats, which do much to off-set the inherited tend- 
encies towards vegetarianism. 

Mrs Bergen's studies in the folk-lore of New England and 
her investigations of the popular names of American plants 
contain much information concerning the food of a vegetable 
character, which children, like primitive peoples, seek out for 
themselves in the meadow and the forest The range of these 
vegetable foods is very great. The following list made up 
from Mrs Bergen's papers contains indeed but a few of them, 
for their name is really 'legion' (leaves, roots, stalks, fruits, 
berries) : — 

Smilax rotundifolia ; the young leaves, which are eaten, 
are called in certain parts of Massachusetts 'biscuit- 
leaves,' 'bread and butter.' 

Claytonia perfoliata, called in parts of California 'wild 
lettuce,' and eaten as lettuce. 

Saxifraga mertensiafta, called in Southern California ' cocoa- 
nuts,' the bulbs being dug up and eaten. 

Brodicea capitata, hog-onion — 'the corm tastes like elm- 
bark.' 

Stretopus roseus — 'the cathartic fruit freely eaten.' 



256 THE CHILD 

Cy perns strigosus, called, at Concord, Mass., ' nut-grass,' 

the tubers being eaten. 
Podophyllum peltatum, called in Iowa ' hog-apple ' — the 

mawkish fruit is eaten. 
Astragalus mexicanus, called, in South-Western Missouri, 

' prairie apple ' — the fruit is eaten. 
Azalea nudt/lora, the insipid gall-excrescences, called 

'swamp-apples,' are eaten, like oak-galls. 
Acorus cala7?ius (sweet flag) — 'the great buds are considered 

a deHcacy,' while 'sometimes the boys pull up the 

leaves or blades of the calamus, and eat the white 

substance at the base.' 
Apios tuberosa (pig-nut) — the fleshy tubers are dug up and 

eaten. 

Other vegetable foods, exclusive, of course, of acorns and 
nuts, are the leaves and young sprouts of the ' checker-berry,' 
the bark of the black-birch, the bark and young buds of the 
sassafras and the ' spice-bush,' the tender young leaves of the 
beech, and many more. 

Apple-stealing and apple-nibbling, so common in boys 
(and often girls as well) of all civiHsed races, have been made 
much of by the evolutionistic philosophers as heirlooms from 
the animal ancestors of man. Schneider, who has written the 
story of the human and the animal will, observes : ' Remark- 
ably constant and obstinate is the inheritance of the instinct 
for apple-stealing and apple-nibbling which manifests itself so 
strongly in boyhood. Although for generations past the apple 
has been only an accessory food, and education has been 
working against this predilection of youth for plundering 
orchards, the sight of the fruit arouses in the young human 
being still such a strong desire and so great an appetite that 
the instinct often overcomes all notions of danger, even 
when the apple is still green and unpalatable. And who 
is there who does not remember in adult age the great 
pleasure which, as a boy, he had in scaling his neigh- 
bour's fence and nlHng his pockets with apples? There 
is no other food the sight of which awakes in youth so 
strong a desire as does the apple, and we are led to con- 
clude therefrom that our animal or savage human ancestors 
must have been especially given to eating apples, a view 
that gains support from the fact that, with primitive peoples, 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 257 

as with monkeys, the apple is a chief article of food' 
(613, I. p. 70). 

rSteinmetz, however, who cites the opinion of Schneider, 
believes that too much has been made of the idea of ' appetite,' 
and that the phenomena in question are capable of other 
explanations, and may arise from love of adventure, exercise 
of power, etc. Moreover, must we explain the child's liking 
for the lime in confectionery from the clay-eating propensities 
of certain savage peoples ? How are we to account for the 
child's early antipathy to meat, when so many primitive races 
have been carnivorous for ages, or how explain the rarity of 
anthropophagic phenomena in childhood ? And why should 
the child like sweet-things, sugar, candy, etc., as much as he 
does apples, or even before them ? How are we to explain the 
presence in the boy at the same time of a frugivorous and a 
beUicose instinct? It has often been said that fruit-eating 
primitive peoples are less belHgerent than those who are 
carnivorous. As Tarde well says : ' If the ancestor of man 
was frugivorous — that is to say, a gentle animal, full of tender- 
ness towards his fellows, as are the most of the apes, it is not 
war or murder that we must think of explaining by atavism, 
but rather family life and the development of patriarchal 
virtues.'^ 

Keane, who holds that when the precursor of man was 
' driven by the increasing cold of the first Ice Age from arboreal 
habits to a nomad life on the plains he readily acquired 
omnivorous tastes ' — man in the ' eolithic ' stage was ' mainly 
frugivorous ' — calls attention to the fact that the higher apes 
are not, as is commonly supposed, exclusively herbivorous in 
their wild state, but are also 'insectivorous and carnivorous, 
eating vermin, eggs, small rodents and birds greedily ' (322, 
p. III). 

Dirt Atavisms.—'' Dirt ' or ' filth atavisms ' are represented 
by the kneading and modelling of one's own excrement, a 
practice often observed in monkeys and in children belonging 
to the races of highest culture and social development, and not 
unknown among even educated adults, for the field of porno- 
mania is indeed a wide one ; also by like procedures with other 
dirt and filth. Many facts of value in the comparative study 
of ' filth atavisms ' are to be found in Captain J. G. Bourke's 
learned and exhaustive work on Scato logic Rites. 
^ Philos. Fi^nale, p. 6, 
R 



258 THE CHILi3 

Mimetic Atavisms. — Muscular or mimetic atavisms are also 
best seen in the child, whose motions and bodily activities 
are full of regressive characteristics — biting, scratching and 
clawing, poking and handling, nibbling and biting grass, stalks 
of plants, etc., balancing and rocking about, shuffling about 
in the dry leaves on the ground, heaping up wet sand with the 
feet, lying at full length on the green turf, climbing trees, 
paddling in brooks and streams — all acts of which adults are 
much more often guilty than is commonly supposed. The 
delight the child takes in roUing about on the green, soft, 
elastic earth is common to monkeys and to men. It is said 
that the natives of the Argentine Republic who have sojourned 
for a long time in the desert highlands of Bolivia, when they 
return to the rich and blooming meadows of their own country, 
leap and spring and roll about as do the colts and horses. 
The pleasure that the ordinary boy takes in kicking along a 
piece of wood or any other small object that may He across 
the sidewalk or the path on which he is going is equalled 
only by the subsequently developing passion for football. The 
child's attempts to throw with the foot a piece of wood, etc., 
placed across the toes finds a parallel in the ' stick-kicking ' 
race of the Zuhi Indians as described by Mr F. W. Hodge, a 
foot-xdiCQ to which these aborigines are passionately devoted. 
' Considering the extreme lightness of the race-stick,' says Mr 
Hodge, ' the distance which it is sent by a single kick, or rather 
toss, with the toes is remarkable. Very often a stick is raised 
aloft in this manner about thirty feet and falls at least a 
hundred feet from the point at which it was lifted.' For such 
races training begins very early : ' At almost any time a naked 
youngster of four or five years may be seen playing at kicking 
the stick outside the door of his own home, or, if a year or two 
older, coming from the cornfield — where he has been dutifully 
engaged in frightening off the crows — tossing the stick as far as 
his little feet will allow him.' The httle boys also have their 
own match-races. ^ 

Genital Atavisms. — Genital atavisms are represented 
alike by the ' love-bites ' and other exaggerated kisses and 
caresses which the infatuated of both sexes lavish upon each - 
other, and in many of the strange and bestial love- expressions, 
which sometimes bring man down to even a lower level than 
that on which the brute stands, though many of these 
'^ Avier. Anfhr., III. p. 231. 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 259 

phenomena of the latter sort are to be accounted pathological 
or disease products. ' I could eat you,' still says many a man 
or woman when kissing the beloved, and, according to M. Paul 
d'Enjoy, (192), the utterance is very significant. The Move- 
bites ' which figure so prominently in Germany and England 
among the uneducated classes, in the days of engagement and 
during the honeymoon, are but evidences of the cannibahstic 
origin of kissing. M. d'Enjoy tells us that there are two 
kinds of kissing, the ' suction or suckle kiss ' of the white race, 
and the ' smell or sniff kiss ' of the Chinese and certain other 
Mongolian peoples. The gestures and other movements 
accompanying both the ' white kiss ' and the ' yellow kiss ' are 
such as to indicate that they spring from the idea of cannibalistic 
self-preservation, and recall the scents, sniffs, smells, smacks 
and bites of the beast of prey at its victim. In the case of the 
Mongolian the 'smell of the prey is still pleasant,' in the case 
of the European there lingers yet some shadow of the actual 
cannibalistic act. When the lover declares his readiness to 
eat the beloved out of sheer love he has unconsciously retraced 
aeons of the history of animal life in the world. It is signifi- 
cant, in this connection, that with some primitive peoples 
kisses are only bestowed upon infants, and the mother's art 
of ' kissing the hurts and bruises of her child to make them 
well ' may not be all pure affection ; so likewise the Mingrelian 
custom in accordance with which young maidens obtain for 
themselves protectors by having youths bite at their breasts 
symbolically (107, p. 217). 

Another aspect of genital atavisms must be read of the 
ever-growing literature of sexual perversion, love-fetishism, 
prostitution male and female, onanism, phallicism, etc., 
represented by the recent works of Krafft-Ebing, Moll, 
Havelock Ellis, etc. 

Cruelty Atavisms. — Atavisms of cruelty embrace a large 
category of peculiarities which are really relics of the cruelty 
and vindictiveness of our forefathers, so many of which fierce 
traits constantly recur in war and the chase ; hunting and 
soldiering are both but cruelty-professions in more or less 
civiUsed garb — ' killing is still noble, though the fashion of it 
has changed.' Civilisation to-day permits cannons, but forbids 
poisoned arrows, allows a city to be laid in ashes, but will not 
hear of poisoning the drinking water of the enemy. Bull-fights 
in Spain, cock-fights in America, rat-fights among the lowest 



26o THE CHILD 

and most depraved classes, dog-fights and cat-fights among 
criminals and children, all testify to the powerful role still 
played among the most civilised races by this class of psychic 
atavisms. Mantegazza even goes so far as to say that he 
himself has seen and noted many times in physiologists, 
surgeons, soldiers in battle and other 'professional killers,' 
involuntary muscular twitches and movements which mani- 
fested the pleasure they took in killing. But in more 
' peaceful ' walks of life these tendencies surge up also. The 
same writer mentions the case of a lawyer, whose favourite 
occupation consisted in the cruel pursuit of wall-lizards, and 
that of a nobleman, who liked to feast his eyes on the death- 
struggles of cats slowly boiling to death in pots covered with 
a wire-grating. In children, again, this class of atavisms appear 
with remarkable frequency and in notable exaggeration ; the 
deliberate pulling to pieces of a fly or the tearing apart 
limb by limb of some poor quivering bird is a famJliar 
instance. 

These ' cruelty atavisms ' have been much discussed of late 
years by writers who have dealt with the facts of childhood. 
Commenting upon the famous saying of La Fontaine, — ' this 
age is pitiless,' — Compayre remarks (123, p. 308) : ' To judge 
from appearances. La Fontaine is right. But the alleged 
cruelty of the child when he tortures animals is, at bottom, 
only ignorance. The child is a Cartesian without knowing it ; 
he makes no distinction between his Punch and his dog. If 
the doctrine of the automatism of animals had not had the 
good fortune to enter one day the brain of a great philosopher, 
it would find at least perpetual adherents in all those little 
executioners of two or three years, who torture their favourite 
animals only because they do not know they hurt them.' 
Ignorance and curiosity, together, explain much of the ' cruelty ' 
attributed to the child. 

According to the best teachings of the modern criminolo- 
gists, ' a certain amount of cruelty is almost normal in healthy 
children,' and 'the instinctive criminal is more distinctly 
marked by his continuance of the same practices through- 
out life' (184, p. 130). Among one hundred criminals 
studied by Rossi,^ ten manifested this exaggerated and pre- 
cocious cruelty — one, as a child, being fond of stripping 
young birds of their feathers and then roasting them alive, 
^Arch. d. PsicL, 1889. 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 26 1 

while another visited upon birds the punishments received 
at the hands of his parents. 

The child is very often similarly-minded to the aborigines 
of Australia of whom Lumholtz writes : ' During my sojourn 
at Herbert Vale a woman offered to sell me a bird, which she 
had deprived of the power of flight by plucking out the 
feathers of the wings and tail. She laughed at and was merry 
over the poor bird, which was unable to fly away. The natives 
may often appear cruel towards animals and birds, though it 
is not their intention to give pain to the game they capture. 
It amuses them to see maimed animals making desperate 
efl'orts to get away. As a rule, they kill the animal at 
once, not for the purpose of relieving it from pain, but 
simply to make sure of their game. On many occasions 
I observed how the blacks amused themselves by watching 
kangaroos whose hind legs had been maimed struggling in 
vain to get away. 

' Any studied cruelty towards the white men is out of the 
question. They do not, like the Indians, use torture, for they 
are anxious to take the life of their enemies as soon as possible ' 
(381, p. 222). 

, Steinmetz's view of the development of the feeling of 
revenge, from 'an original stage of undirected revenge,' in 
which the injury was retaliated indiscriminately on anyone, 
through a stage of less indiscrimination, in which man came 
gradually to the consciousness that ' the best means of 
restraining wrong was to punish a certain person, viz., the 
wrong-doer,' has been criticised by Westermarck (680, p. 291), 
who thinks many of the cases cited in proof of the theory 
merely exemplify ' sudden anger,' ' outbursts of wounded-self- 
feeling,' ' fits of passion,' and not revenge in the real sense of 
the term, ' which, when not directed against its proper object, 
can afford only an inadequate consolation to a revengeful 
man.' Other cases are as surely the records of ' established and 
recognised customs, and show to what an extreme the suffer- 
ings of ip*iocent people are disregarded among many savage 
races.' 'Custom, indeed, often clouds some of the seemingly 
clear and strongly-marked instincts of the savage, and Dr 
Westermarck is quite right in denouncing the uncritical inter- 
pretations of these ' survivals from earlier stages through which 
the human race has passed.' According to Westermarck, 
animal psychology enables us to furnish the series of evolution- 



262 THE CHILD 

ary stages : ' protective reflex action, anger without intention to 
cause suffering, anger with such an intention, more dehberate 
resentment or revenge,' phenomena, all of which ' are so 
inseparably connected with each other that no one can say 
where one passes into another.' 

,, A very interesting contribution to the study of ' cruelty 
atavisms ' is Dr F. L. Burk's recent paper on ' Teasing and 
Bullying,' wherein are contained the results ('the responses 
include about 1120 instances of teasing and bullying, princi- 
pally reminiscent, and a few hearsay ') of a syllabus-inquiry on 
the subject. The varieties of ' bullying and teasing ' include 
fighting; egotistic assertion of authority; obtaining property, 
service, obedience, etc., by bullying; tormenting, teasing, 
hindering, ' aggravating ' ; excitation of fear ; performing, or 
'almost performing' forbidden things; teasing by taking away 
or hiding property ; teasing by calling names ; testing temper ; 
teasing individuals with personal peculiarities; exciting dis- 
appointment; pleasurable teasing about beaux, possessions, 
etc. ; bullying voluntarily accepted by the victim, etc. The 
varieties last mentioned are of considerable importance, for 
these same self-humiHations and abasements are rife to-day in 
children, who thus seek to appease their offended companions, 
playmates, friends, in lovers who try to win back the favour of 
the objects of their affections, in women who endeavour to 
rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of angered or offended 
husbands. The parlour-game of ' forfeits,' and similar sports 
in vogue among children, often recall the same primitive actions, 
akin to which are also many of the initiation-ceremonies of 
secret societies of children and of adults, ancient and modern, 
savage and civilised. The admission of children to manhood, 
of women to marriage, of strangers and foreigners to citizenship 
or membership in tribal or religious organisations, the restora- 
tion of captives and criminals to life and activity, all these 
episodes were accompanied by acts of humiliation and self- 
abasement, the shades of which yet wander over the play- 
grounds of the young as well as the parlours and club-rooms 
of the adults of modern cultured races. These are mostly the 
remains of punishments in which the idea of humiliation (now 
given a sort of altruistic turn and carried on with the consent 
of the victim, who smiles at his own abasement or annoyance) 
has more and more prevailed over the thought of physical 
torture, so common among many of the early races of men, 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 263 

■' Burk (and likewise President Hall) is inclined to look upon 
some of the phenomena of teasing and bullying as a rude but 
necessary species of physical education for the child, the 
physical exertions therein concerned being ' fragmentary rudi- 
ments of past combat, capture, and killing of prey and enemies,' 
and, therefore, ' clearly the most ancient forms of physical exer- 
cise, by which and for which the organism developed, and has 
become what it was and is ' — they are, in fact, ' racial forms of 
all exercise' (92, p. 371). This is to be understood of fighting 
and the various forms of personal struggle and contact appear- 
ing in tag, prisoner's base, blind man's buff, football, baseball, 
etc., and all exercises and games in which striking, pursuing, 
capturing, holding, treating in contempt and triumph, throwing 
missiles, etc., figure as essential factors. The teasing impulse, 
as both Burk and Groos point out, is often largely in the nature 
of play, and, as the latter notes, it has not infrequently a social 
role in securing the survival of the strongest in the sense of 
him who is able to withstand best the ' teasing and bullying ' 
of his fellows. Among some primitive peoples, and with some 
half-civiUsed (Siamese, e.g.^ according to Bastian), teasing is 
almost a fine art (253, p. 294). One must read Groos's illumi- 
nating discussion of plays of animals and of men in order to 
appreciate rightly the views put forward in such essays as 
Johnson's ' Savagery of Boyhood,' and Boyle's ' Persistence of 
Savagery in Civilisation,' to say nothing of the less reasonable 
literature of the Lombrosan school of criminologists, so many 
of whom attach altogether too much importance to atavisms of 
this sort. 

Miscellaneous Atavisms. — Under the head of miscellaneous 
atavisms Mantegazza has grouped a large number of regressive 
phenomena, e.g.^ the occurrence of mental and psychic peculi- 
arities and qualities of ancestors in their descendants, without 
any physical resemblance between the latter and the former ; 
Mantegazza, himself, who does not at all resemble his paternal 
great-grandmother, possesses, nevertheless, her "sudxV^di penchant 
for gardening. Other examples are : {a) Sometimes to-day the 
BoHvian Indians appear before the judge and request to be 
beaten with a stick — a remembrancer of Incasial and Spanish 
despotism; (b) women in the height of their love-passion would 
be beaten by the objects of their affection, and dream that in 
their embraces they have been mutilated or tortured till the 
blood canie — a recollection of the past ages of tyranny when 



264 THE CHILD 

the husband was practically the executioner, the women the 
sacrificial offering ; (c) the exaggerated fear-movements of the 
Jews in the countries of modern Europe — a form of psychic 
atavism which recalls the age-long persecutions to which they 
have been subjected at the hands of the Christian nations ; {d) 
the dignity of countenance of the 'last Roman' — calling up 
again a mighty people, who, for centuries, ruled the world ; {e) 
the majesty of a Castilian beggar in rags — bringing back the 
departed greatness and vanished glory of Spain. 

From a careful study of the family likenesses of the Hohen- 
zoUerns and the Bourbons, Count Theodore Zichy reaches the 
following conclusions: i. Nearly everybody has the features 
of some not very remote ancestor (if all the series were present 
at once such resemblances would be clearly perceived). 2. A 
constant inherited family type does exist in certain stocks, but 
by no means in all. 3. Between brothers and sisters (children 
of the same family) resemblances are frequent, but, for the 
most part, noticeable only in youth. 4. Resemblances between 
parents and children are best confirmed during the youth of 
the individuals. 5. Here and there occur in individuals strik- 
ing resemblances to very remote ancestors (695). 

Dr E. G. Lancaster, in his essay on the psychology and 
pedagogy of adolescence (345, p. 17), calls attention to the 
changes of form and feature in the growing child, some of 
which hint heredity, 'the final struggle and opportunity to 
establish the type coming at adolescence.' The author cites 
the following interesting case in point : ' As a babe he looked 
like his mother. At two to three he was the childish image 
of her mother, while in the way he stood and in a peculiarity 
of falling he showed their traits. Since five or six he has 
grown to look very much as his father did at that age, and 
a photograph of the father taken when he was seven is a 
good likeness of the boy at seven. He now walks and acts 
like his father. He will undoubtedly look like the father 
and the father's family.' Allied phenomena are also noted, 
the variety of ' ancestral traits cropping out ' being quite 
extensive — mental pecuHarities, movements, gait, gesture, 
voice, etc. 

Dr Bucke's Outre Vieivs. — Some advanced, if not altogether 
extravagant, ideas concerning the ' Mental Evolution of Man ' 
have recently been published by Dr R. M. Bucke, in an 
address before the British Medical Association at Montreal iZ'^). 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 265 

The author holds that ' the mental plane of the higher animals 
is that of the human being at about two years of age,' that ' the 
third year of life represents in the race the age of the alalus 
homo, the period of perhaps 100,000 years ago, when our 
ancestors walked erect, but not having self-consciousness had 
no true language,' while 'the advance made by the individual 
from the age of three to that of thirty-five represents the 
advance of the race between the date of the appearance of self- 
consciousness and to-day. Dr Bucke also thinks that 'the 
longer the race is in possession of a faculty, the more universal 
will it be in the race and the more firmly fixed in the individuals 
of the race,' the musical sense, e.g., is now in process of birth 
into the race, being not present in more than one half of it. 
The mind during sleep 'is more primitive than the waking 
mind,' and 'in dreams we pass backward into pre-human 
mental life.' All forms of insanity and idiocy, Dr Bucke 
believes, are cases of atavism, and rapid mental evolution is 
responsible for insanity. 

Dr Donath, in his brief but interesting address on 'The 
Beginnings of the Human Mmd' (171, pp. 16-20), criticises 
many of these statements of Bucke, and protests against the 
tendency ' to discover atavism in everything born with abnormal 
development or disposition.' He rightly objects : 'When the 
embryo has a limb cut off by the navel-string winding about 
it, that is certainly no atavistic phenomenon ; nor is it when a 
germ infected by syphilis or poisoned by alcoholism causes to 
be born an epileptic or an idiot child.' So, too, hysteria and 
lunacy are not reversions to primitive forms of mind, while 
other phenomena, hastily judged atavistic, are due to mechanical 
interferences, the action of chemical substances, etc. The 
keen logic and apt judgment of many primitive peoples, 
together with the existence of corresponding phenomena in 
animals known to dream^, the actuality and the liveliness of 
these dreams, do not altogether favour the view of the extreme 
pre-human character of such phenomena. The opinion of 
Dr Bucke that all forms of lunacy and idiocy are atavistic is 
certainly weakened by the fact that these phenomena increase 
and decrease for sociological reasons, and seem to be greatly 
influenced by syphiUs and alcoholism. 

Fear Atavis?ns. — The fears of childhood are ' remembered 
at every step,' and have been since the grey dawn of civilisa-. 
tion. Mosso, in his monograph on fear (443, p. 226), says: 



266 THE CHILD 

' The one who brings up a child represents its brain. Every 
ugly thing told to the child, every shock, every fright given 
him, will remain, like minute splinters in the flesh, to torture 
him all his life long.' The bravest old soldier, the most daring 
young reprobrate alike are incapable of forgetting them all, for 
' the eye of the child seems to cast one more look upon these 
scenes from out of the very depths of the soul.' The lamias, 
the masks, the bogies, ogres, hobgoblins, witches and wizards, 
the things that bite and peck, that clutch and scratch, that nip 
and crunch, that pinch and tear, the thousand and one imag- 
inary monsters of the mother, the nurse or the servant, have 
had their effect, and ' hundreds of generations have worked to 
denaturalise the brains of children.' This is added to the 
hereditary fears which children have of dogs and cats, and the 
spectres of their dreams, so vividly real. Birds, the most fear- 
showing of all animals, and guinea-pigs, of all mammals the 
most susceptible to fright, hardly have behind them the fear- 
heredity of the child. In the words of Mosso : ' What we call 
instinct is the voice of past generations reverberating like a 
distant echo in the cells of the nervous system. We feel the 
breath, the advice, the experience of all men, from those who 
Hved on acorns and struggled with wild beasts, dying naked in 
the forest, down to the virtue and toil of our father, the fear 
and love of our mother.' Although we cannot justly trace 
religion back to fear, as did the ancient philosopher, for that 
great storehouse of human feehngs and emotion has many 
monuments of love as well, fear has done much for the human 
race. 

One of the most remarkable contributions to the literature 
of atavism which have appeared of recent years is President 
Hall's elaborate 'Study of Fears,' in which are discussed the 
data (obtained by the syllabus method) concerning the nature 
and significance of 'the chief fears (298 different things) of 
1 701 people mostly under twenty-three years of age.' Fear is 
one of the aspects of the human soul where we may expect to 
find reflections and reverberations of all the past ages of Hfe in 
the world, its shocks and sudden metamorphoses, its long 
subjection to particular environments, its contact with all the 
conditions of earth, sea and sky, and ' the relative intensity of 
these fears fits past conditions far better than it does present 
ones ' j and, in youth, especially, ' the intensity of many fears 
is out of all proportion to the exciting cause.' ' Night is now 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 267 

the safest time,' says Dr Hall (276, p. 247), 'serpents are no 
longer among our most fatal foes, and most of the animal fears 
do not fit the present conditions of civihsed life ; strangers are 
not usually dangerous, nor are big eyes and teeth ; celestial 
fears fit the heavens of ancient superstition, and not the heavens 
of modern science. The weather fears and the incessant talk 
about the weather fit a condition of life in trees, caves or tents, 
or at least of far greater exposure and less protection from heat, 
cold, storm, etc., than present houses, carriages, and even dress 
afford. . . . The first experiences with water, the moderate 
noise of the wind, or the distant thunder, etc., might excite 
faint fear, but why does it sometimes make children on the 
instant frantic with panic ? ' The past of man forever seems 
to Hnger in his present, and the child no less sums up and 
reflects past ages of fear and past fear-experiences than he 
summarises physically the story of mankind. 

Among the principal fears which President Hall seeks more 
or less to explain thus are : — 

1. Gravity Fears. — Fears of high places and fears of falling ; 
dropping, hovering, 'cosmic giddiness,' gliding, balancing, 
flying, climbing, and other sensations not fears. Some of these, 
Dr Hall thinks, 'may be considered as instances of arrest, 
some at the stage before erect position was acquired,' while 
others are 'due to an awakening of the normal impulse of 
the young of the human species to get up, not only to 
the full length of the body, but beyond.' Man's erect 
position, ' exceptional and lately acquired,' counts for not 
a little here. 

2. Fear of losing Orientation. — Some of the phenomena 
here ' almost suggest atavistic relapse toward the early forms 
of sessile life, or attachment to parental bodies, and remind 
us how slow and late in the animal series well-developed loco- 
motor organs came,' while others, on the other hand, ' suggest 
the migratory instincts of birds, fishes, animals, nomadic races, 
the spring fever so common among northern races after their 
long winter, scholares vagantes, tramps, explorers, globe-trotters, 
etc' Here we have reminiscences of ' the mortal dangers of 
getting lost in a primitive gregarious life,' which were vivid and 
' prompted to a careful study of all land-marks.' 

3. Fear of Closeness, Smothering, Chokiiig, Stifling, Oppres- 
sion. — Some of the ' reverberations ' here seem to go back to 
the most primitive forms of life, while others suggest the ' un- 



268 THE CHILD 

confined ' range of nomadic peoples, repeated, perhaps, in the 
tendency of prisoners to ' break out,' and preserved in the 
' free air ' democracies of the old world. 

4. Fears of Water. — Some of the phobias here m.ay be ' purely 
instinctive vestiges, which originated somewhere since the time 
when our remote ancestors left the sea, ceased to be amphi- 
bious, and made the land their home ' ; in the ' weaning from 
the home of all life,' the discipline was stern as the alternating 
and sometimes intense love for water as compared with fear of 
water shows. Both love of water and fear of water have been 
conditions for survival in the past of animal life, hence the 
persistence of both to-day in the child. 

5. Fears of Wind. — Here we meet with evidence that ' wind, ) 
more perhaps than any or all things else, created in primitive 
consciousness the unseen spiritual world.' In children and 
adolescents we may discover ' some trace or scar of the more 
dreadful storms of the long age of diluvial man, or even of the 
older sea.' 

6. Fears of Celestial Objects. — In the soul of the child we can 
still find ' abundant traces of the original psychoplasm, out of 
which primitive man created the many fairy or demonial beings 
seen in cloud, fog, and all the phenomena of day and night.' 
Children and adults have for ages been arrested at various 
stages of such development, and their fears made panicky or 
permanent. 

7. Fear of Fire. — Here we have suggestions of 'fossil forms 
of neural tweaks, inherited terrors, thrills and shudders, which 
we may regard as survivals from a stage of psychic life so low 
and so far transcended that the adult consciousness, while it 
may repress, cannot uproot them.' There are traces also of 
another psychosis born of the companionship of primitive man 
and fire, so that even now 'just to idly gaze at fire starts 
dreamy reveries, veined through which are traces of very 
primeval yet earnest thinking.' 

8. Fear of Darkness. — Though some children are certainly 
free from this phobia, there is abundant evidence of 'the intense 
and manifold fears of every kind of monster, accident, dreadful 
men, or worse ghosts that prey upon childhood in the dark.' 
Lacking our ' better knowledge,' children are back with primi- 
tive man under the rule of ' the old night of ignorance, mother 
of fears,' old scars of the battle against which they seem often 
to reveal. 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 269 

9. Dream Fears.— \a\q primitive man, the child realises in 
dreams what he often fears only in waking hours, and the 
reverberations from the past life of the race are often easier 
and more detailed. 

10. Shock. — In the animal world dread of shock and sur- 
prise has led to many modifications of habits and to many 
devices for preservation of the individual and of the species. 
In children, ' we still get glimpses not only of what the ancient 
chaos of ignorance really meant, and of the awful struggle 
and loss by which it has been overcome, but also of the 
sanifying culture power of what are now the common-places 
of science.' 

11. Fear of Thunder and Lightning. — One notable fact con- 
fronting us here is that ' for primitive consciousness, belief in 
and reverence of powers above are never so fervid as in a 
thunderstorm,' and the child repeats the history of the race in 
his thunder-fears, which modern society makes so little use of 
for moral, aesthetic, and religious ends. 

12. Fear of Animals. — Here, especially, we catch glimpses 
of lapsed reflexes, fragments and relics of psychic states and 
acts, which are now rarely seen in all their former vigour, and 
which neither the individual Hfe of the child nor even present 
conditions can wholly explain. Fear of cat, dog, cow, etc., 
may only be coeval with the domestication of animals, but 
fears of reptiles, especially snakes, as marked in the race as 
they are in the individual (monkey no less than man) go back 
much farther in the history of life, as must also do some of the 
factors in the child's general love of animals that so often casts 
out all fear. 

13. Fear of Eyes. — In a certain sense, even in man, the eye 
is the first thing, and often it is all things. The ' big eyes ' 
that frighten the bad child, like those the savage carves on his 
weapons, masks, canoes, etc., ' must owe some of their terrors 
to ancestral reverberations from the long ages during which man 
struggled for existence with animals with big or strange eyes 
and teeth, and from the long war of all against all within his 
own species.' 

14. Fear of Teeth. — Here the kiss has conquered after long 
ages the old 'archaic dread ' that spread abroad 'supreme fear 
wherever the law " eat or be eaten " reigned.' The child, here, 
too, is older than the man. 

15. Fear of Fur. — Both love and fear of fur are 'so 



270 THE CHILD 

strong and instinctive that they can hardly be fully accounted 
for without recourse to a time when association with animals 
was far closer than now, or, perhaps, when our remote ancestors 
were hairy.' 

16. Fears of Persons. — In the fears, blushing, etc., of 
children, we find still ' the echo of old dreads of alien faces 
long aftef the voluntary muscles or their cerebral centres need 
not be flushed for flight or fight,' and even ' shyness, coyness, 
maidenly modesty, owe their charm to the female reluctance 
born of fear.' Unconsciously children still treat even friends 
as possible enemies. 

17. Fear of Solitude. — Man is a gregarious animal, and in 
children's 'horror of being alone,' we see, often in arrested and 
hypertrophied form, the fear that has much to do in ' making 
the fashions, parties, and sects of the most imitative of all 
creatures.' The long dependent infancy of the human being 
has been a factor here. 

1 8. Fears of Death and of Disease. — These fears, unlike those 
of animals, seem rather to increase than to decline with civilis- 
ation, and their absence, rather than their presence, must be 
looked upon as atavistic. In these fears the root from which 
they spring lies beyond the savage even, while some noble 
struggles to-day against death and disease ' must, in part, have 
been made possible by heredity from a time of ancient relative 
indifference to death.' 

19. Fears of Ghosts. — Here we must admit that some fears 
'have taken their rise in the early human period,' and man 
still ' inherits from a savage ancestry a pre~potent bias, which 
haunts the very nerves and pulses of the most cultured, to 
believe in ghosts.' 

Fear, if it be as G, Stanley Hall suggests, 'anticipatory 
pain,' has been a great schoolmaster of the race, and the timid, 
who so often are the wisest, have survived not alone by the 
pre-perception of the future, but also by the suggestion of the 
past, Fear was, perhaps, the first attempt of the race to 
make use of its past, and out of this has come abundance of 
knowledge. 

Anger Atavisms. — Atavistic in its general character and in 
many of its specific tendencies is Dr Hall's latest ' Study of 
Anger,' in which also the doctrine is advanced that ' most of 
the history of life as recorded in the rocks since the amphi- 
oxus, has been devoted to the development of muscles, and to 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 27 1 

laying the basis of all that they presuppose for the soul ; and 
the suggestion is irresistible that the roots of our emotional 
life, must be traced back to those Pateologic ages where pre- 
vertebrate life had its fullest development' (277, p. 77). The 
story of anger, like that of fear, demonstrates the fact that 
' the feelings are infinitely older than the will, as it is older 
than the intellect.' 

Among other physical manifestations of anger, which seem 
to be atavistic, Dr Hall notes the following : — i. Swallowing^ 
impulse to swallow^ etc. — These concomitants of the early 
stage of anger in many individuals suggest the actions of the 
carnivora and other ' palseo-psychic associations' of the attack 
and slaughter of prey — 'the normal prelude to eating it.' 
2. Salivation. — Suggests the ' primitive anticipation of savoury 
food ' in creatures that kill their prey. 3. Spitti?ig. — Suggestive 
of the purposive and aggressive ' spitting ' of many animals — 
especially noticeable in children. 4. Respiration, — The 
modifications and disturbances of breathing, which often 
accompany anger in so marked a fashion, suggest the 'pre- 
paration for a long dive, with violent exercise,' and the 
' periods of deep and rapid breathing, alternating with longer 
periods of rest,' required by amphibian life. 5. Noises. — The 
characteristic 'cries, snarls, growls, whoops, bellows, chatters, 
bleats, grunts, barks,' and other noises of children, and often 
of adults in anger, suggest the cries and noises made by 
various of the lower animals. The howls of packs of animals 
have their fellows, if not their descendants, in the battle-cries 
of savage races and the defiant college-yells at athletic 
contests. 6. Attitudes and Postures. — Many of the character- 
istic postures and attitudes of persons in angry moods suggest 
the actions of the lower animals. 7. Butting and pounding 
with the head. — These accompaniments of anger, seen 
especially in young children (boys generally), and in some of 
the lower races {e.g.^ Negroes), receive some explanation from 
the fact that 'early vertebrates, both aquatic and terrestrial, 
move head first, and there is thus a long ancestral experience 
of removing obstacles and breaking way through water with 
the head.' The sideways blows of the head in butting, and 
the threatening sideway nod of children in incipient anger, 
'are interesting when we reflect on the number of horned 
species in the human pedigree.' 8. Stamping and treading 
upon the toes, feet, or other parts of the body of an opponent 



2J2 THE CHILD 

in anger (^., the savage dances in which the ground is 
stamped with great force) suggests the 'stamping of the 
enemy under foot,' indulged in by some of the lower animals 
— repeated by the brutal classes in civilised human communi- 
ties. 9. Making faces. — The virtuoso-skill of children in 
' making faces,' not in anger merely, and the ' strange passion 
for masks 'seen in the dances, etc., of savages, suggest the 
characteristic grimaces of the monkeys and other animals, on 
the one hand, and, on the other, the 'facial expressions 
intended to strike terror,' so common in the lower animals. 
10. Biting^ cheiving. — Perhaps 'the last vaso-motor or in- 
voluntary automatic residues of what was once a fully 
unfolded carnivorous psychosis ' are seen in the ' mouth- 
consciousness,' and 'the would-like-to-eat ' feelings of certain 
individuals in anger, while the sneer and spasmus cynicus are 
'relics of dental attack' more fully represented by the biting, 
chewing, ' gripping ' of children, idiots, savages, and the lower 
and criminal classes among civilised peoples, besides certain 
sexual degenerates. 11. Scratching^ clawing^ clutching^ pinch- 
ing^ pulling^ etc. — Many of the phenomena belonging here in 
childhood may receive . explanation from the ancient and 
effective use of the paws and claws ' in the felidse and other 
animals, both in and near the conjectural line of human 
evolution.' The mutilations occurring correspond often to 
those in the animal-fights of ages past; the baby's 'grip,' too, 
suggests arboreal life. 12. Hugging. — This accompaniment of 
anger in children (girls especially) suggests the aggressive, 
crushing, strangling movements of some of the lower animals. 
13. Pushing^ striking.^ etc. — These more human accompani- 
ments, so common in children, suggest the savage races of 
men, some of the anthropoids, and certain animals lower down 
in the scale of being. 14. A?iger at itianimate and insentient 
objects. — Very common in children, savages and the un- 
educated. Here ' we seem to have a momentary lapse back 
to a primitive animistic stage of psychic evolution, in which 
the distinction between the things that have life and feeling 
and those that lack both was not established.' 

The vents of anger, the reactions from anger, the control 
of anger, the abandon in anger, the individual and sexual 
variations, the correlations between anger and fear, and other 
emotions, all offer other examples of atavistic or retrogressive 
phenomena. 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 2/3 

Work and Play. — That the work of adults in one age of 
human history becomes the play of children in another is an 
idea made famiUar by the researches of Tylor and other 
writers of the anthropological school. Professor Jastrow, in 
the course of his essay on analogy, remarks that ' the principle 
that what was once the serious occupation of men becomes in 
more advanced stages of culture the play of children, or is 
reduced from seriousness to mere amusement, finds illustration 
in the mental as in the material world. The drum, once the 
serious, terrifying instrument of the savage warrior, and the 
rattle, once the powerful emblem of the medicine-man, have 
become the common toys of children. The bow and arrow 
are used for skill and sport only' (313). 

Weapons. — Concerning the bow and arrow in Polynesia, 
Professor O. T. Mason writes (411, p. 386): 'The pure Poly- 
nesians seem to have had no bows. . . . The bow has not 
been known as a weapon among the brown Polynesians in 
historical times. Its occurrence as a toy in one place, and 
as a ceremonial object in another, may point to a prehistoric 
use, but the fact remains that, while the negroid peoples 
around them carried the arrow especially to a high degree of 
perfection, the brown race discarded the apparatus of the 
archer altogether.' In Hawaii, the bow seems never to have 
been used in war, but only employed by the chiefs in shooting 
mice in connection with certain religious ceremonies. Arrow 
or dart throwing, which was formerly a man's game, is now 
played by boys and girls, so also with reed-throwing in some 
of the other Polynesian Islands, according to Mr Culin (135, 

P- 233-) 

Among even the lower races of mankind, those who have 
not reached the stages of civiHsation at all, the games and 
toys of the children, which have not yet been thoroughly 
studied from the point of view of evolution, seem to represent 
a bygone manhood, or to forecast a future one, just as with 
us. The story of the 'blow-gun' is like that of the bow. 
The 'blow-gun,' or 'blow-tube,' the predecessor of the rifle 
and the air-gun (some of the Indians of the Gulf States even 
' lashed several reeds together, thus anticipating the revolver '), 
is a characteristic war and hunting weapon among many tribes 
of the Orinoco-Amazonian region of South America and the 
Malay Peninsula and Archipelago of South-Eastern Asia. It 
is also known in Central America, and among the Cherokees 



274 THE CHILD 

and some other Indian peoples of the south-eastern portion 
of the United States. According to Professor Mason (411, 
p. 279), in Copan, in Guatemala, 'even the children go armed 
with a sarbacan, or blow-tube, an instrument which they use 
very dexterously, and which they have inherited from their 
earliest ancestors.' Of certain Indians of the western United 
States, Captain J. G. Bourke, who knew them well, says,^ 
' It is not unlikely that the Apaches were once familiar with 
some form of the blow-gun, because their children occasion- 
ally make use of a toy constructed on the same principle.' 
With some savage peoples, then, the blow-tube would seem 
to have been used in about the same fashion as that delight 
of civiHsed children the 'pea-shooter,' one of its modern 
descendants and representatives. 

Bull-roarer. — The 'bull-roarer,' or 'whizzing stick,' which, 
among many barbarous and savage tribes of both hemispheres, 
is an instrument of solemn or magical ceremonial significance, 
especially in connection with the initiation rites at puberty, is 
with the children of civilised races a common plaything. 
This it also seems to be with some primitive peoples. 
According to Mr John Murdoch,^ the 'whizzing stick' is 
very common among the Eskimo of north-western Alaska, 
and 'is as purely a child's toy as it is among civiHsed 
peoples.' The bull-roarer is known also as a children's toy 
or commbn plaything in Hawaii, and in several other parts of 
Polynesia, together with several other whirring and whizzing 
devices of Uke sort, although in certain portions of the Pacific 
region it is used in connection with the sacred mysteries, or 
to drive away ghosts (135, p. 220). Doubtless careful study 
of the distribution of this particular instrument will reveal 
many other instances of its employment as a toy among 
peoples who are quite as primitive as those with whom it is 
in use for more serious and important purposes. 

Chinese '• play^ with Inventio?is. — One cannot always be 
sure that the children in such cases have the things as toys 
which their ancestors used as implements or weapons, for it 
may be that these have always been with certain peoples 
children's toys only, or have, perhaps, never progressed beyond 
the stage of amusement or inventive satisfaction. The Chinese, 
in some respects, mentally, as well as physically, are one of the 

^ Aiiier. Anthr., HI. p. 258. 
^ Amer. Anthr., III. p. 59. 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 275 

most childlike peoples on the globe, and Dr Brinton calls 
attention to their ' insufficiency of development, strikingly 
illustrated by the little use they made of important discoveries ' 
— the magnetic needle, gunpowder, movable type, etc. This 
people 'were acquainted as early as 121 a.d. with the power 
of the magnet to point to the north, but the needle was never 
used in navigation, but only as a toy. They manufactured 
powder long before the Europeans, but only to put it in fire- 
crackers. They invented printing with movable type in the 
eleventh century, but never adopted it in their printing offices. 
They have domesticated cattle for thousands of years, but 
do not milk the cows nor make butter' (74, p. 200). This 
example of a people so numerous and so remarkably ingenious 
in many directions, as are the Chinese, continuing for ages 
to play, as it were, with such great inventions, is perhaps 
unparalleled. 

Mr David Boyle, in his discussion of 'The Persistence 
of Savagery in Civilisation,' traces to a savage source the stone- 
throwing proclivities of boys, and their indulgence, later on, 
in the use of slings, bows and arrows, pea-shooters, and later 
still, revolvers, rifles, etc. (69, p. 130). But here it is not 
so much a question of play perhaps as of perpetuated sav- 
agery. The same thing might be said of ' cruelty to animals, 
cocking-mains, pugilism, man-bull fights, etc.,' while sports and 
games may be only ' improved forms of old hand-to-hand en- 
counters,' and music and dancing still bear the traces of their 
connection with the excitement and rejoicings of war and 
battle. 

Kite-flying. — Kite-flying, which, except for scientific pur- 
poses, is, with us, a children's amusement and a sport of 
youth, is by no means such all over the world. In China, 
from time immemorial, adults have delighted in this sport, 
which is also known of old time in Japan and the Far East 
generally. 

Among the Polynesians also kite-flying was by no means 
confined to children or youths. In the Hervey Islands, accord- 
ing to Mr Gill, kite-flying was in times of peace 'the great 
delight of aged men,' and in Hawaii people of all ages flew 
kites, as was also the case in New Zealand and elsewhere. 
Codrington tells us that ' kites used in fishing in the Solomon 
Islands and Santa Cruz are used as toys in Bank's Islands and 
New Hebrides, although not commonly of late years ' (135, 



276 THE CHILD 

p. 276). Here we have a scientific (as it were) use of the kite 
and a play-use, comparable to the use of the kite to-day with 
us for meteorological purposes and its use in games by our 
children. 

Dolls. — Dr J. W. Fewkes, who has made a long and careful 
study of the rites and ceremonies of the Pueblos Indians, be- 
Heves that ' dolls among civiHsed nations are simple survivals 
of figurines used as idols,' and sees in the 'images given to 
little girls ' in certain ceremonies of the Tusayan Indians, a 
' transition stage in which the doll still preserves the symbolic 
marks [these wooden images invariably bear the symbolism of 
different mythological personages called ka-tci-nas which figure 
in the sacred dances] characteristic of the idol.'^ 

In an exhaustive study of the ' Dolls of the Tusayan 
Indians,' the same authority discusses the matter in great de- 
tail. Some of the facts suggest a connection between ' doll-cult 
and ancestor-worship,' but, as may be seen from the authorities 
cited in the ' Study of Dolls ' by Mr A. C. Ellis and President 
Hall, there is no general agreement among ethnologists as to 
any connection between dolls and rehgion, mythology, fetishes, 
emblems, idols, etc., the majority agreeing with Dr Brinton 
that ' while certain dolls may be made in the image of fetishes 
or idols, the sentiment of playing with dolls seems altogether 
too spontaneous and independent to have been derived from 
ceremonies' (182, p. 173). The variations in the 'doll-cult' 
with primitive peoples as among civilised children are very great, 
while the antiquity of dolls a.s mere toys is very great, as the 
catacombs of Rome, the graves of the ancient Peruvians and 
Egyptians prove, while, as Andree notes, Sardes, in Asia Minor, '/l 
was an ancient factory town of dolls, etc., just as Niirnberg and -i 
Sonneberg are to-day (8, p. 53) ; the Orient was the home of 
many dolls, that afterwards found welcome in Europe, just as 
it was the native place of many of the games and plays of 
children. 

Sofigs and Games of Children. — According to Mr W. W. 
Newell (456, p. i), who has investigated the 'Games and Songs 
of American Children,' there seems to be no doubt that 'a 
majority of the games of children are played with rhyme- 
formulas, which have been handed down from generation to 
generation.' The metre of some of the German children's 
songs, Dr Hildebrand has shown (297, p. 33), is of the oldest 
1 Amer. Anthr., VH. p. 38. 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 277 

known Germanic type, forms of verse that the greatest poets of 
the nation, Goethe and Schiller, have often used, and yet forms 
so ancient and so characteristic of child-song, that it might 
even be said that 'we owe German metre to the children.' 
The rhythm of ' Bauer baue Kessel ' is old as that of Otfried, 
and springs from the same source. Tiersot, in his ' History 
of Folk-Song in France' (p. 131), notes that a variant of the 
familiar round 'Pont d'Avignon,' served as a theme for a 
Huguenot psalm of the sixteenth century, and not a few other 
serious compositions in many countries go back to the naive 
simplicity of child-song. 

Dr H. Carrington Bolton, in his classic study of the 
' Counting-Out Rhymes of Children,' those meaningless jingles 
with which children all over the globe begin their games and 
make their decisions, comes to the conclusion that we have in 
them a notable example of the survival in the usages of 
children of the serious practices of adults in primitive stages 
of culture, these rhymes really representing the mysterious 
sortilegic formulae of past ages ; children now select their 
leader or partner as once men selected victims for sacrifice. 
This view has received wide credence among folk-lorists of 
recent years, but there is more than one argument against it. 
Mr W. W. Newell, the eminent American folk-lorist, holds that 
while these ' childish formulas ' may have arisen from ' a serious 
superstition,' the formulas do not, in themselves, bear out such 
a theory, it being quite possible that ' the meaningless form of 
the rhymes is the natural result of transference from language to 
language, and of time.' Another point of importance is noted 
by Mr Newell, viz., that in the ' counting-out ' of children ' the 
selected person is he on whom the lot does not fall,' something 
not characteristic of sacrificial rites and formula, but ' a usage, 
for which there is an obvious reason in the game itself.' The 
practice of ' successive exclusions ' is thus characteristic of the 
child-procedure, and 'the adoption of syllables instead of num- 
bers is especially intended to secure fairness ; it is more diffi- 
cult to calculate the result.' If the 'counting-out' of children 
has really originated in forgotten sortilegic rites, it is clear 
that the child-mind, or some other influence, has interfered to 
shape it admirably to the necessities of its present employment. 
The existence of these children's rites side by side with the seri- 
ous ceremonials of people more or less primitive, with no clear 
indication of the derivation of the former from the latter, is also 



2^8 THE CHILD 

a point worth consideration in the discussion oi their ultimate 
source.^ Nonsense refrains for dances and similar exercises are 
known all over the world in every stage of culture, no less than 
among the children of civilised men, whose rhymes and whose 
poetry have so often such a large element of purely unintelligible 
or unmeaning sounds in them. Much of the earliest com- 
position of a literary nature among primitive people and 
children, quite apart from rite or ceremony, consists of ' non- 
sense words and syllables.' Wallaschek, in his investigation 
of ' Primitive Music,' and Bolton, in his study of ' Rhythm,' 
have called marked attention to these nonsense refrains, 
chants, jingles, repetitions and spontaneous rhythmic utter- 
ances, common to primitive man and the civiHsed child. Evi- 
dence that very much of human poetry has been developed 
from just such unintelligible verse, in which alliteration and 
rhyme often seem to occur quite accidentally, is to be found 
not only in the great collections of children's song-games, such 
as those of Newell and Gomme, or in the chants of savage 
and barbarous peoples, but also in the nonsense refrains, 
chorus, etc., of many of the hymns and popular songs of the 
most cultured races of the globe. The resemblance between 
the metre of the poetry of children's games and the rhythm of 
their spontaneous utterances is pointed out by Dr Bolton, who 
cites numerous examples in illustration of the rapprochement. 
The ethnographic and ethnological aspects of the games and 
sports of children and adults have been discussed in the essays 
of Tylor, Andree, Culin, etc., where a mass of interesting infor- 
mation will be found. 

According to Miss Paola Lombroso (369, p. 132), the 
classic, traditional plays and games ' stand in the same relation 
to those invented by the child, as written tradition does to im- 
provisation.' The genius of childhood reveals itself more in 
the latter than in the former, which are so often transmitted 
from generation to generation, and found all over the world in 
but slightly different form and fashion. The practical uni- 
versality of many games can be seen from a glance into the 
collections of Pitre, Newell, Gomme, Culin, and the briefer 
studies of Tylor and Andree. The readiness with which 
children of European ancestry can fall into the play-life and 
play-interests of the children of primitive peoples has been 
noted by many travellers, but no better example can be found 
^ Journ. Avier. Folk-Lo7'e^ I. p. 242. 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 279 

than Mrs Rink's account of the play-activities of her childhood 
among the Eskimo children of Greenland (253, p. 391). Just 
as the adult savage is so often seized with a passion to imitate 
all the characteristic movements and actions of the new-come 
white man, so are children of white descent, in a primitive en- 
vironment, whenever they are free from the restraints of their 
civilised elders, seized by a real longing to act as their savage 
playmates do ; one touch of play seems to make all the world 
of childhood akin, and as a result of the primitive declaration, 
' where thou art, I shall be also,' we see laid in Greenland the first 
stones of a new fabric of civilisation (destined to be destroyed 
by parental interference), which repeats for us in some measure 
the first real break from social animality. If, as Guyau tell us, 
' modesty has civilised love ' in the history of the race, we may 
say with some assurance that ' play has civiHsed strength and 
knowledge.' 

Atavisms of Huiiting and Fishing. — If there be anything in 
atavisms, the secret desire and frequent attempts of children to 
catch birds and animals with the naked hands, or fish with the 
naked feet, mean a good deal. Professor O. T. Mason tells 
us that the boy's method of hunting and catching by hand 
fish, eggs, young animals, shell-fish, insects, etc., is the oldest 
and the longest to survive (as it does to-day) of all the arts of 
zootechny. The old proverb, ' A bird in the hand is worth two 
in the bush,' grew up quite naturally it would seem. The 
Eskimo have been known to catch seals by the flippers as they 
were escaping to the water ; the Wailaki Indians of California, 
to capture rabbits and deer by running them down ; the 
Micmacs, of Nova Scotia, to run down a stag by continual, 
unresting pursuit; many primitive hunters (disguised, or in 
some sort of retreat) capture various water-fowl and other 
birds with the bare hands. Boys among the Seri Indians 
'run down flocks of birds, rabbits, and other swift animals, 
bringing contempt on themselves if they fail ' ; certain Indians 
of British Columbia, and other parts of North and South 
America, where fish are very abundant, capture them by hand 
amid the shallows and among the rocks; the Mura, of the 
Amazon, ' dive for turtles and catch them by the legs ' \ some 
Indian tribes of the western coast of the United States ' catch 
turbot and flounders with their feet ' ; the Wintun Indians, of 
California, dive for clams, etc. One is surprised at the uni- 
versality of this method of capture in America and other parts 



280 THE CHILD 

of the world, although, of course, higher and more developed 
methods of hunting and fishing often exist alongside it in the 
same region and with the same primitive tribe (413, p. 5^)- 
Especially noteworthy in this direction is the delight boys often 
take in chasing animals until they are altogether fatigued, and 
must perforce give in. 

Atavisms of Dress. — The modern civilised man and woman 
at home or at leisure often wear the garb or the gear of primi- 
tive men and women, in medias res or on their travels. 
Children also to-day wear and use not a little of the dress and 
rigging-out of the earliest races of mankind. Mason has noted 
many of these survivals in his study of primitive travel and 
transportation. The light shawl on the arm of the opera- 
goer or evening visitor goes back to the primitive precautionary 
garment represented by the Semito-Hamitic girdle or sash 
that may become a shawl on occasion, the poncho of the 
Latin Americans, etc. The modern costly walking-cane, the 
wand of the magician, and the bishop's crozier are all develop- 
ments of the primitive traveller's staff, the stick of the early 
carrier. The modern child's night-drawers remind us of the 
woman's boots of the Eskimo, where shoe, legging and breeches 
are continuous, and of the costumes of the very primitive 
natives of the Mackenzie River region. The clog, which sur- 
vives in tanneries, is the result of the effort of primitive men 
to keep their feet dry, and the high-heeled shoes of actors and 
fashionable women spring ultimately from the same effort to 
rise above the inconveniences of wet land, bog and seashore. 
The stocking with divided toes was long ago anticipated by 
the roaming tribes of middle and western Asia. The ' gum- 
boots ' which the climate of New England has made necessary 
are quite of the old Eskimo pattern. The ice-creepers, so 
commonly attached to the soles of the boots and shoes in 
winter tim.e in the New England States, are precisely like those 
of the Eskimo, Chukchi, Kamchadales, etc., except that they 
are made of leather and iron. The spiked boots of the 
runner and football player of to-day find their counterpart in 
the bone-spiked hunting shoes of the Kamchatkans. And 
there are many other things that might be enumerated did 
space permit, but those given here will easily suggest other 
examples of heirlooms from primitive man into the possession 
of which (practically unchanged) the civilised child of to-day 
comes. 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 28 1 

Modesty. — The evolution of modesty has been quite recently 
treated of by Havelock ElHs (188, p. 135), who tells us ' that the 
child, though very bashful, is wholly devoid of modesty,' as is 
abundantly proved by the shocking ' incofwenance of children in 
speech and act,' and by the ' charming ways in which they inno- 
cently disregard the conventions of modesty their elders thrust 
upon them, or, even when anxious to carry them out, wholly 
miss the point at issue.' With civilised man, it thus appears, 
' the convention of modesty long precedes its real develop- 
ment,' which takes place at the advent of puberty, although 
modesty is by no means altogether of sexual origin. Savage 
men, as EHis notes, are modest not only towards women but 
towards their own sex as well, as shown by seclusion for the 
exercise of natural functions, taboos of eating, ceremonial un- 
cleanness, etc. The savage knows also the blush, the hang- 
ing of the head and other phenomena connected with modesty, 
for with him it often ' possesses the strength of a genuine and 
irresistible instinct,' which does not excite the ridicule and con- 
tempt it so often meets with among us. It is among savages 
that people die for modesty's sake. 

There can hardly be any close paralleUsm between the 
child before puberty and the lower races of men on the score 
of modesty (which, as ethnic customs prove, is by no means 
confined to one particular portion of the body alone), but 
some sort of comparisons may be instituted between the 
clothes-lusts of children and those of primitive peoples, and 
between their eating customs. In the matter of modesty, 
generally, it is the ignorant classes of our civilised communities, 
who, with their greater possession of it, will best bear com- 
parison with savage and barbarous peoples. 

Progress by Regression. — The irreversibility of regressive 
evolution — i.e., organs or institutions that have disappeared 
altogether, or have been reduced to vestigial conditions, can 
never reappear or develop themselves anew — is an idea 
supported by Demoor, Massart and Vandervelde, but re- 
jected by Mantegazza, who remarks that 'pathology and 
atavism furnish us every day with exceptions to such a law — 
the reappearance of lost organs in the flowers of our garden 
geraniums, the resurgence of the lost toes of the horse, the 
repubhcanism of Rome under Rienzi in the fourteenth century 
(democracy of olden times in feudal days), the revival of 
antiquity (educational and scientific) in the Renaissance, the 



282 THE CHILD 

Romanesque characters of the French Constitution and Govern- 
ment during the Revolution epoch, the revival in 1896 of the 
Olympian games after fifteen hundred years, were not all of 
them mere superficial imitations, passing whims or fads ; the 
institution was not able to live in a radically transformed 
environment.' The real conclusion to be drawn is that 
' regression never really is a return to the primitive condition ' 
(398, p. 251). The cause of regressive evolution the authors 
see in ' the limitation of the means of subsistence ' (food for 
the organisms, capital and strength of labour for societies), a 
theory, which, as Mantegazza says, is not large enough, nor 
worthy enough for evolution. Regression, atrophy, disap- 
pearance of one organ or institution, mean new aims, new 
possibilities, new acquisitions, new perfection, new evolution — 
the reject is certain evidence of the higher project. Function 
(though it needs food) is more than food, and the mind of 
man is not threatened eternally by famine. As old Sir Thomas 
Browne said long ago : 'There is surely a piece of divinity in 
us ' j and this ' piece of divinity ' rules all — the harmony of 
man with the laws of the universe. Regression is the sign of 
progression, not the evidence of faihng nutrition. 

The very common opinion that regression always takes 
place in the inverse order of progressive evolution (an idea 
favoured by the etymology of the words) is rejected by these 
authors, as not justified by the facts of botany, zoology and 
sociology, where there are too many instances of the truth that 
the disappearance of a useless organ, and not the manner in 
which it vanishes, is the point of importance, to allow the 
prevalence of such a general and absolute law. Moreover, 
variation does not seem to follow laws that are fixed and forms 
that are immutable, and while the more recent acquisitions do 
sometimes disappear the first, it has yet to be shown that the 
]^persistent portions disappear in the inverse order of their 
formation, or thaf the vanished parts reappear once more 
never to return. The plant-world seems to furnish the least 
evidence of 'regression in the inverse order of formation,' and 
in the animal world stability and complexity, strength of 
stimulus and action of environment, rather than order of origin 
or of formation, seem to determine the disappearances and 
the reappearances of biological characters. With man, as 
Mantegazza points out in his review of the book under dis- 
cussion, we meet with similar contrasting phenomena (398, p. 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 283 

251) : ' In some cases the most recent institutions disappear the 
first, while the most ancient last the longest ; but in other cases 
just the opposite happens. We know that legislative, juridical 
and religious changes follow very long after, never precede, 
the transformations of the economic, family, or moral order. 
Tarde has said that imitation happens from within outwards, 
i.e.^ aims and sentiments are imitated before their means and 
expressions. These last (usages, laws or ceremonies of 
religion) are more recent than the profound changes to which 
they correspond, and yet, in cases of regressive evolution, they 
are not sure to be the first to disappear. Titles and heraldry 
survive the nobihty. Houses were considered movable long 
after the disorganisation of the nomad tribes, whose tent-Hfe 
has made them adopt that legal idea.' 

The history of the various views that have been held by 
different authorities as to the significance of the metopic 
suture forms an interesting chapter in the literature of re- 
gressive evolution, or progressive atavism. Talbot, in his study 
of Degeneracy (625, p. 162), considers the synostosis, or com- 
plete obliteration of the frontal suture, ' normal and in the line 
of advance.' The earlier writers, generally, like Blumenbach, 
Hyrtl, etc., looked upon its persistence as an arrest of develop- 
ment merely or as theromorphic. Welcker, however, in 1862, 
and Anutschin, in 1880, sought to connect it with greater 
brain development and intelligence, both individual and 
racially, a view glimpsed by Hunault, in 1740, who, however, 
linked with strong brain-growth weak and defective bony 
development. At present, 'metopisni,' the persistence more 
or less even to adult life, of the frontal or metopic suture, the 
consohdation of which leads to the formation of the char- 
acteristic unitary frontal bone of the human skull, is a subject 
of increasing importance. The question of piscine or reptilian 
atavism has been driven into the background by the new 
question of progressive evolution. Papillault's very recent 
essay, the material for which was furnished by ninety metopic 
crania from the catacombs of Paris, maintains that the per- 
sistence of the suture in question is due to a cerebral superiority, 
the prime cause of which originates in the brain itself. Metopic 
skulls, according to Papillault, show a greater development in 
the regions corresponding to the cerebral hemispheres, and 
the increase of relative brain-weight apparently accompanying 
this is but one of the numerous marks of morphologic 



284 ~ THE CHILD 

superiority such crania possess. As a result of numerous 
measurements, both of metopic and non-metopic skulls, the 
author comes to the conclusion that the cause of metopism lies 
in the brain itself, viz., 'a growth in width of the cerebral 
lobes, exerting upon the skull a centrifugal pressure, and 
keeping the two frontal bones separated.' Although one can- 
not as yet dogmatise upon the matter, the evidence seems to 
point to a relation between metopism and increased intelli- 
gence ; the relative superiority in brain-weight, however, Inay 
go either with a really better developed intellect, or (without 
change of intelligence) with a shorter stature (the Negritos, a 
small-statured people, e.g., offer frequent cases of metopism) ; 
the metopic may thus, seemingly, approach the woman or the 
child. According to Papillault, woman is not as much more 
metopic than man, as might be perhaps expected, on account 
of the development of the female brain in the inferior portions, 
which, in a way, relieve the pressure noted above. 

Buschan, like Papillault, looks upon ' metopism,' which he 
notes as being present among the low^er races of the world in 
the proportion of some 2 per cent., while in the various peoples 
of white European stock the ratio is much higher, 5.9 per cent, 
to 12.5 per cent, as a sign of intellectual superiority, not an 
atavistic inferiority. Far from being due to excessive weak- 
ness of the frontal bones, the persistence of the frontal suture 
is evidence of the very active growth of the cerebral hemi- 
spheres. 

The metopic suture, favoured by the growth of culture and 
human social sympathies, may in the future play a highly 
important role in the history of the race. It is a marked 
example of a variation (by many called an atavism), which the 
advancing civilisation of mankind is bound to allow to come 
to full fruition. To use the significant words of Papillault : 
'Civilisation, by multiplying and strengthening the bonds of 
social sohdarity, by augmenting, in the struggle of interests, 
the role of intelligence, and diminishing, in the chances of 
success, the primitively preponderating influence of brute 
strength, permits the weak who are intellectually well-endowed 
to live and to prosper, and thus becomes one of the most 
powerful factors of metopism.' 

The new altruistic struggle for existence in the human race 
is destined, evidently, to make use of many other phenomena 
also, whose occurrence in man has been regarded as ' mere 



THE CHILD AS REVEALER OF THE PAST 285 

atavisms,' in ways that were not possible under the old law of 
the survival of the strongest in the physical sense of the term. 
He who now is able to survive by reason of his social fitness 
will be able to utilise or re-use innumerable devices which 
nature abandoned in the brute struggle of the distant past. 





>^- > 



- ^ />v ^^^^^ 




vmmm^ear^faxiemesm^ 



A YOUNG BARBARIAN 
(A Pueblo Indian Girl, aged about 15, from Hep. U.S. Nat. I\Ius., Vol. VIII.). 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 

Ma7i and the Animals. — Mme. Clemence Royer, in her study 
of the Origin of Man and of Societies^ pubUshed nearly thirty 
years ago (556, p. 95), remarked that man is distinguished 
from the animals only by a more extensive gamut of passions 
and more varied instinctive nature : ' His mind is at bottom 
just the same instrument whose mechanism does not differ 
from that of the animal ; it is a more extensive key-board on 
which, instead of getting a few unconnected sounds and 
elementary harmonies, expressing a restricted number of ideas 
and of feehngs, he obtains more and more complicated 
harmonies, more and more composite melodies, more and 
more varied rhythms, and so on up to the marvellous sym- 
phonies of thought and of passion.' 

Professor Wesley Mills, who likewise holds that ' no small 
part of our psychic life differs from that of animals rather in 
degree than in kind,' observes also that 'many of the per- 
formances of the lower animals, if accomplished by men, would- 
be regarded as indications of the possession of marvellous genius ' 
(427, pp. 16, 13); that indeed 'there is not a single sense that 
man possesses in which he is not excelled by some one animal, 
often immeasurably.' 

The performances of homing pigeons, the migration of 
birds, the response of the dog to human language, the per- 
severance of the cat and its independence, the sensibility of 
sheep and other domestic animals to approaching atmospherical 
changes, the achievements of the beaver, the horse, and the 
elephant of the dog and of less known and less noticed 
animals, the musical talents of some of the rodents, etc., 

287 



288 THE CHILD 

are all wonderful in a way, but there is still reason, perhaps, 
for halting between two opinions. Professor Mills observes 
(427, p. 22) : 'If the highest among dogs, apes and elephants 
be compared with the lowest among savage tribes, the balance, 
whether mental or moral, will not be very largely in man's 
favour — indeed, in many cases, the reverse.' 

Professor Mills beheves that while such animals as the dog 
and the cat ' run through the main stages of their psychic life 
very much more rapidly than the child,' yet, ' apart from the 
use of language and the special peculiarities of the psychic 
activity dependent on this, there is a closer resemblance — at 
all events, if we restrict our comparisons to unlettered, and 
especially uncivihsed, men — than most persons would suspect, 
or, owing to prejudices, would be inclined to admit' (427, 
p. 13). The dog, the kitten and the child at certain periods 
of their existence are remarkably close together. Professor 
Mills goes so far as to say that ' many dogs do really know 
their names in the same sense as very young children, if not 
even in a higher sense' (427, p. 34), that 'the capacity of 
animals to communicate with each other by a language of their 
own is much under-estimated' (427, p. 39), and that 'it is 
scarcely possible to account for the conduct of the horse, dog, 
elephant and ape, under certain circumstances, without 
believing that they have the power to generalise upon 
details.' 

Professor Lester F. Ward (675, p. 242) holds that man is 
' simply the most favoured of all the " favoured races " that 
have struggled up from a remote and humble origin,' and his 
superiority ' is due almost exclusively to his extraordinary 
brain development.' Dr Ward thinks also that 'if the 
developed brain had been awarded to any one of the other 
animals of nearly the same size as man, that animal would 
have dominated the earth in much the same way that man 
does,' for 'a large part of what constitutes the physical 
superiority of man is directly due to his brain development.' 
The achievements of this animal would have been entirely 
different from those of man, but they ' would have had the same 
rank and secured for that race the same mastery over animate 
and inanimate nature.' 

Professor S. N. Patten (476, p. 116) thinks that the 'rapid 
progress ' of man may have blocked the way for any ' increase 
in the intelligence of the lower animals,' and that ' it is not pro- 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 289 

bable that the growth of inteUigence would have ceased if man 
had been destroyed by some misfortune.' The opposition of 
interests between man and the other animals is one great 
factor in causing the ' wide gulf now existing between them.' 
In other words, ' the rapid progress of the human species does 
not seem to have been due to any inherent superiority, but 
results from conditions giving to it a better series of requisites 
for survival than other animals have had.' Some of the other 
animals, indeed, 'the carnivora and ungulata, seem at one 
time to have had, in this respect, an advantage over the 
ancestors of men.' Indeed, were it not for 'obstacles delaying 
progress until the proper requisites for survival were found,' 
we might reasonably expect that ' the older species would be the 
most advanced and have the most intelligence.' Man's ability 
to survive in new environments, whose new requisites for 
survival cause ' knowledge to come by leaps and bounds,' is 
the measure of his progress. 

The ethical and juridical aspects of man's relations with the 
animal world in the course of his progress from savagery to 
civilisation have been well studied by Bregenzer, who, how- 
ever, exaggerates somewhat when he concludes that ' the 
popular ideas concerning the relation of men to animals are, 
after all, at the root of philosophical theories.' Animal-worship, 
totemism, sacrifice, domestication, reveal facts which go to 
show how, from primitive animism, the starting-point of all 
rehgious development, man has risen towards a monistic con- 
ception of nature, in which animals, no less than children and 
women — both of whom in ages past had but few inherent 
privileges — have 'rights.' From the domestication of animals 
sprang love for them, and love leads to law, though here, as 
everywhere else, contempt and hate often insinuate themselves ; 
love and monism have waxed together, both man and beast 
have suffered most when dualism and anthropocentrism ruled 
in matters of religion. The child in presence of a pet animal, 
or even a gentle wild one, represents a past age of humanity in 
which fear readily passed into love and that contact of life and 
life out of which ethics has grown was all-powerful. Presum- 
ably woman and the young of slaughtered or captured animals 
came early into relations with each other, and some of the 
' taming ' of the 'gentler sex ' was accomplished through the 
domestication of creatures lower in the scale of animal 
being. 

T 



290 THE CHILD 

histinct aiid Reason. — G. Bikeles, who has made a com- 
parative study of the facts in Waitz's Anthropologie and 
Brehm's Thierleben, with a view to discovering what feelings and 
emotions are common to primitive man and to animals, con- 
cludes that the basic feelings are : Love of parents for their 
offspring, jealousy, attachment to place of birth, effort for 
social life together, sympathy, desire after power, collecting 
impulse, vanity, and revenge. From the vanity of animals 
have arisen in man honour, respect, reverence, piety and shame 
(from consideration of suffering affecting vanity and honour) ; 
hope has grown out of the anxiety of man for the future, 
remorse out of transient feelings of aversion, and justice out of 
blood-revenge (55). 

Instinct and reason, the ways of thinking of the animal and 
of the man, have, according to De Mortillet, no fundamental 
difference, the divergence being one of degree only, not one of 
kind. Mathias Duval's discovery of the amoebism of animal 
cells and Flechsig's doctrine of association-centres promise, 
according to Dr Laloy, to solve the problem of the mechanism 
of thought in such a way as to recognise the essential oneness 
of reason and instinct, the greater tendency to persist and 
become hereditary in the associations, caused by the greater 
stiffness and difficulty of movement in the prolongations of the 
nerve-cells in animals, as compared with man, being sufficient, 
perhaps, to explain the difference.^ The oneness of reason 
(which is only a refined form of instinct) and instinct has also 
been recognised by Marshall. Making the very justifiable 
condition that 'in no case may we interpret an action as the 
outcome of a higher psychic factor, if it can be interpreted as the 
outcome of one which stands lower in the psychological scale,' 
Professor Lloyd Morgan comes to the conclusion that ' the pro- 
babilities are that animals do not reason,' that their memory 
is ' entirely of the desultory type,' that, although they show 
'sense of the lapse of time,' systematic memory is beyond 
their reach. Animals thus may be said to be ' without the 
perception of relations and the faculty of reason.' Man, who 
is intelligent and rational, 'has not left behind him the 
emotions of his animal nature ; he has realised and purified 
them.' 

And civilised man has proceeded likewise with the heritage 
of his savage ancestors. The demonstration and elucidation 
^ V Anthropologie, X. p. 218. 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 291 

of this idealisation and purification, the 'growth of the soul of 
man,' has lately been taken up by Dr G. Stanley Hall in 
connection with the ' Child Study ' movement in America. 

The Child a?id the Savage. — That the child, in many re- 
spects, resembles the savage is an idea familiar even to some 
of the writers of antiquity, who saw that the childhood of the 
race and the childhood of the individual had not a few things 
in common. (Lucretius, Vitruvius, Diodorus Siculus, and 
other poets and philosophers ancient and modern, agree with 
Shelley, who summed up the question epigrammatically in his 
brief declaration, ' the savage is to ages what the child is to 
years.' 

For Miss Paola Lombroso, whose Essays in Child Psycho- 
logy is one of the most interesting books about the child we 
possess : ' The child is a little compressed, synthetic picture 
of all the stages of man's evolution ' — an evolution which has 
been controlled in all its history by the same principle, ' the 
adaptation to life with the least effort,' the 'pulsing eurhythmia 
that rules all things' (369, p. 172). 

In his introduction to this book Professor Cesare Lombroso 
speaks of childhood as a ' curious world, in which we get 
glimpses of primitive man — in mental development, in the 
emotions, in impulsivity, in the prevalence of imagination 
over intelligence.' Before their dear little heads, he says, 'we 
forget the cruelty and harshness of the age so primitive re- 
evoked in them, and get the impression not so much of a 
savage forest, as of a garden of primitive flowers which smile at 
us and pleasure us even when they prick us or entrap our feet ' 
(369, p. ix.). 

' Thoreau, the Rousseau of New England — ' the bachelor of 
Nature ' he has been called — a man in whom the savage and 
the genius, the gipsy and the child, all met, was an ideal 
savage 'crusading the woods in perennial quest of a new 
sylvan Jerusalem,' and living a life so naively primitive, that, 
as one of his biographers observes, his existence almost seems 
'a myth.' This great nature-lover came very near to the 
heart of childhood, and he has described some of its keenest 
delights with a master pen. He thus tells the story of the 
house : ' Adam and Eve, according to the fable, wore the 
bower before other clothes. Man wanted a home, a place of 
warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth 
of the affections. We may imagine a time when, in the infancy 



292 THE CHILD 

of the human race, some enterprising mortal crept into a 
hollow in a rock for shelter. Every child begins the world 
again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet 
and cold. It plays house as well as horse, having an instinct 
for it. 

['Who does not remember the interest with which, when 
yoiing, he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a 
cave ? It was the natural yearning of that portion of our most 
primitive ancestor which still survived in us. From the cave 
we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark and 'boughs, 
of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of boards 
and shingles, of stones and tiles. At last we know not what 
it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more 
senses than we think. From the hearth to the field is a great 
distance. It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend 
more of our days and nights without any obstruction between 
us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much 
from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do 
not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in 
dovecots' (638, p. 26). 

The Savage and thelgnoraitt, — Not all students of human 
history and inquirers into the psychic phenomena of existing 
races are, however, prepared to admit a parallel betv/een 
the mind of the savage and that of the child. Dr D. G. 
Brinton, the eminent Americanist, whose volume on the Re- 
ligions of Primitive Peoples is the best presentation of the 
phenomena of religion as found among the lower races that 
we possess as yet, expressed himself in these terms (77, pp. 12 
and 14) : 'The savage state was the childhood of the race, and 
by some the mind of the savage has been likened to that of the 
child. But the resemblance is merely superficial. It rather 
resembles that of the uncultivated and ignorant adult among 
ourselves. The same inaccurate observation and illogical 
modes of thought characterise both.' 

As serving to explain ' most of the absurdities of primitive 
religions,' Dr Brinton emphasises two traits, ' common in 
civilised conditions, but universal in savagery,' viz., the 
accepting of an idea as true 'without the process of logical 
reasoning or inductive observation,' and 'the extreme nervous 
susceptibility of savages.' 

The comparison of primitive peoples with the ignorant 
peasantry of Europe, or the ignorant lower classes of other 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 293 

countries, has been made by other observers as well. Manou- 
vrier/ says of the Galibis of Guiana, some of whom he studied 
at the Jardin d'Acclimatation in Paris, that they resembled 
' peasants confined in the mountains, leading a simple, mono- 
tonous life, deprived of all instruction,' and that, ' if they were 
to settle among Europeans, as the most ignorant French 
peasants do in the large cities, many of them would soon be 
on a level with these latter.' M. Dally ^ argues that the ' total 
absence of curiosity, and of demands other than those for food 
and drink ' distinguishes them from the peasantry, who would 
have admired a hundred things and asked a thousand ques- 
tions. It is not certain, however, that the confusion noted 
in these Indians is any evidence of lack of curiosity or 
inability to admire, when environmentally at ease. The 
comparison, here, lies more with the child, perhaps, than with 
the peasant. 

Variety in Savage Character. — It has been well said of 
primitive peoples that 'it is as hard to know them as it 
is to know children,' and both are just as shallow and 
just as deep in their knowledge. Absolute trust, comrade- 
ship, absence of guile and overreaching, sympathy with 
habits, customs, prejudices and superstitions, careful avoid- 
ance of all giving offence, display of interest in the things really 
important to savage and barbaric life, are the pass-words by 
which travellers of truly scientific bent have entered into the 
realities of primitive man's thoughts and actions, and the same 
keys open all the doors of childhood. Topinard has sketched 
in brief outline some of the chief facts concerning the un- 
civilised races of man, about whom there is so much mis- 
conception abroad in the land (646, p. 520) : 'The lowest 
savages differ in character, disposition and manners accord- 
ing to the more or less difficult conditions of existence in 
which they are found, and according as they have more or 
less connection with other men, savages or Europeans, who 
stimulate or falsify their character. .^ In himself, the savage 
is usually gentle, kind, of an easy disposition, and with a 
tendency to jollity. He is honest, does not lie, and attempts 
to do no harm either to his own people or to strangers. He is 
sensible to kindnesses which have been extended to him, well- 
wishing, and endowed with a goodly portion of altruism. 

1 Bull Soc. d'Anthr. de Paris, 1S82, p. 814. 

2 Ibid., p. 803. 



294 THE CHILD 

Distrustful, like animals who see for the first time a creature 
which they do not know, his second impulse is that of gentle- 
ness. Nevertheless, he is quick and violent in responding to 
impressions, and may abandon himself to regrettable acts, but 
he quickly regains his natural tendency and grants pardon 
when the offence has not been too grave. Before marriage the 
girls and boys come early under the sway of the sexual instinct, 
and yield to it neither more nor less than in our civilised 
countries. The savage woman is chaste and modest, although 
nude. Her parents carefully watch her; she will have one 
lover or several, or she will be debauched ; if in the first case 
she has a child, public opinion requires that the youth should 
marry her and take charge of the offspring. After marriage, 
the couple are faithful in the same degree that they are in our 
modern societies, if not more so. The husband always keeps 
the same woman.' 

The forest Veddahs of Ceylon, about whom the brothers 
Sarasin have recently written so interestingly, are one of the 
few peoples in the world who may be considered fairly prim- 
itive, and illustrate the generalities of Topinard's description ; 
some of the milder tribes of South American Indians, African 
Negroes and natives of the Pacific Islands belong in the same 
category. 

Primitive Man and Modern Savages. — An extreme view of 
the general character of primitive man is presented by Mr 
TalcoU Williams in his paper ' Was Primitive Man a Modern 
Savage?' Mr Williams (684, p. 542) questions the common 
opinion of the ' progress of man as beginning with a savage — 
bestial, degraded and repulsive, lower than the lowest now 
known — passing upward through incessant centuries of savage 
warfare in which each worse stage has been succeeded by a 
better, all finding their reflex and counterpart in the grim and 
bloody record of the anthropologist, which has in it many 
savage infernos, but no primeval Eden.' It is a mistaken idea, 
so Mr Williams thinks, to hold that ' the savage of the youth 
does not materially differ from the savage of the maturity of 
the race,' and that the lowest savage of to-day represents the 
earliest savage of the past, that ' the modern savage explains 
primitive man.' The condition of many of the savage peoples 
to-day is largely due to pressure, and often to the contiguity of 
civilisation, and to these ' both the savage and the barbarian 
owe their worst qualities.' The Polynesian suffers from 'the 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 295 

pressure of exiguous insular territory'; the Malaysian from 
' hostile inter-tribal pressure stimulated by the ease of water- 
communication in an island and tropical world ' ; the Eskimo 
from ' Arctic pressure,' etc. According to Mr Williams, 
' Peace, not war, would be the normal condition of these ante- 
cedent communities in which the flower of savage life was 
setting into barbarism, and slowly fruiting into civiHsation.' 
The earliest culture caught its tone from peace, and no era 
of conquest had yet appeared, and communication was prob- 
ably freer than in later epochs of war and conquest. Much is 
signified by the fact that ' everywhere the war-god is the 
younger god, not the older, as perpetual war would have made 
him.' 

Doubtless, Mr Williams has drawn a picture of the earliest 
men which, except in so far as war is concerned, will not meet 
with the approval of many modern anthropologists, still less 
with that of those who, holding to the parallel of the individual 
and the race, seek to explain all the pugnacity and the ' fighting 
instinct ' of childhood as inheritances from a primitive era of 
continual warfare and intertribal, interfamilial, inter-individual 
struggle. 

Dr D. G. Brinton ^ rejects Mr Williams's views, with the 
declaration that the ' author is about a century behind time, as 
every student of the actual remains of earliest man knows the 
painful and irrefutable evidence of his worse than barbarous, 
his really brutal condition, apart from all comparisons with 
modern savages.' 

There is much truth in Dr Brinton's contention, which is 
the view of those who do not, with Major Powell (505, p. 103), 
deny the progress of humanity from militancy to industrialism, 
from perpetual warfare to more or less stable peaceful activity. 
Major Powell and his school reject the theory that ' savagery 
is a state of perpetual warfare; that the Hfe of the savage is 
one of ceaseless bloodshed ; that the men of this earliest stage 
of culture live but to kill and devour one another; and that 
infanticide is the common practice.' War itself, has, like all 
other human institutions, 'developed from very lowly begin- 
nings to an advanced stage of organisation.' Social growths 
preceded the advance from the bow and arrow to the Gatling 
gun, from the stone club to the Mauser rifle, from the canoe 
to the modern battleship; great wars were posterior to great 
1 Science, N.S., IX. p. 38. 



296 THE CHILD 

peoples. The wars of savagery were but small interruptions of 
pursuits of peace, and probably no wars of barbaric peoples 
the world ever knew were so destructive or carried on on so large 
a scale as have been some of the wars of civilised nations. 
The theory of evolution, and man as an intellectual animal, 
may be held to predicate, for the earliest known world of 
human beings, group upon group of savages, scattered over all 
the habitable earth, out of whose peaceful efforts the beginnings 
of art, science and religion arose, and from whose clashings 
and combinings in later ages the peculiarities of the first 
civilisations and their successors were produced. 

Mental Character of certain Frh?iitive Peoples. — Mr Curr's 
estimate of the Aborigines of Australia is as follows (136, I. 
p. 42) : ' The mental characteristics of the blacks are worthy of 
notice. The black, especially in his wild state, is quicker 
in the action of his mind, more observant and more self-reliant 
than the English peasant, but less steady, persevering and 
calculating. His mind in many respects is that of a child. In 
our aboriginal schools it has been found that the pupil 
masters reading, writing and arithmetic more quickly than the 
English child. He will also amuse himself with reading stories 
as long as he is under the influence of the whites ; and avail 
himself of his writing to correspond with his absent friends. 
He also shows a liking for pictures, with which he loves to 
adorn the walls of his hut. At this point, however, he 
stops, and, instead of advancing, it is doutful whether he will 
fully maintain through middle age what he learnt in youth. In 
most respects it is clear that the savage cannot be raised to the 
level of our civilisation in a single generation ; but there are 
no grounds for supposing that he would not continue to 
advance from generation to generation with continuous 
cultivation.' 

Concerning the natives of the Andaman Islands, Mr M. V. 
Portman says ^ : ' One often hears the English schoolboy 
described as a savage, and after sixteen years' experience of the 
Andamanese, I find that in many ways they closely resemble 
the average lower-class English country schoolboy.' 

Keane (322, p. 44) cites with approval the statement of 
Captain Binger concerning the West Sudanese : ' The black is 
a child, and will long remain so.' As will be seen later, all 
these statements need qualification, 

'^Joiirn. Anthr. Inst., XXVI. p. 369. 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 297 

Of the Passes Indians, whose 'industrious habits, fidehty, 
and mildness of disposition, docility, and, it may be added, 
personal beauty, especially of the children and women,' made 
them very attractive to the Portuguese colonists in the region of 
the Amazons, Mr H. W. Bates tells us (42, p. 299), that 'had 
the ambition of the chiefs of some of these industrious tribes 
been turned to the acquisition of wealth, probably we should 
have seen indigenous civilised nations in the heart of South 
America similar to those found on the Andes of Peru and 
Mexico.' The teachability of these Passes is seen from the 
readiness with which they have adopted many customs and 
notions of the whites. 

Another ' fundamental defect of character ' in the Ama- 
zonian Indian, besides the communistic idea of property, is the 
absence of ' any notion of domesticating any animals for use as 
food,' a notion which, even under the influence of civilisation 
- — they have taken to the hen, but not well to the ox, sheep and 
hog — seems to come hard to them. This 'defect in the 
Indian character,' according to Mr Bates (42, p. 99), is due to 
the 'domination of the forest,' which has held these native 
races back from progress towards civilisation. 

Of the Orang-kubus, who dwell in the marshy, forested 
region in the north-west part of Palembang, Sumatra, Captain 
Zelle tells us (694, p. 27) that they are one of the most 
primitive peoples in existence, although, so far as character and 
general behaviour are concerned, they rank higher than the 
Battas, who are much more highly civilised"; here, as in certain 
other cases, cannibalism is found with the more civilised tribe. 
Indeed, as M. Zaborowski says (694, p. 34), anthropophagy is 
hardly a primitive custom, since ' it requires the development 
of considerable social inequality to permit certain men to 
cpnsider other men as a species of game.' 

^^--One might also refer to the Maoris of New Zealand, 
who, at the beginning of the present century were fierce 
cannibals, but have now six representatives in the New Zealand 
Legislature, and evidence abundant powers of adaptation and 
improvement.^ The native members of both branches of the 
Legislature, we are told, ' take a dignified, active and intelligent 
part in the debates, especially in those having any reference to 
Maori interests,' and Mr Kidd is led to remark concerning this 
people (325, p. 293), 'though they are slowly disappearing 

1 Nature, 1897, p. 433. 



298 THE CHILD 

before the race of higher social efficiency, with which they have 
come into contact, they do not appear to show any ijitellectual 
incapacity for assimilating European ideas, or for acquiring 
proficiency in any branch of European learning.' 

Professor Blumentritt's recent studies of the Tagals and 
other Malays of the Philippines show the very great native 
ability of this stock, which has produced poets and men of 
science like Rizal, litterateu7's like Luna, painters and artists 
like Resureccion Hidalgo and Juan Luna, besides lawyers and 
physicians in abundance, and gold and silversmiths, wood 
carvers, etc., of a high order of merit. The Malay peoples 
of Java and Sumatra, to say nothing of their congeners in 
Madagascar, have produced men and women who certainly do 
not suffer from comparison with the average of the Aryan or 
Semitic races, while not a few of them would take very high 
rank even there. 

Many primitive peoples, like some of the American Indians, 
the Aetas of Luzon, the Kruman of Liberia, the Bushmen of 
South Africa, certain Australian tribes, etc., while capable of 
absorbing a great deal of the culture of the white race, feeling 
the lack of their old milieu^ with its social advantages, weary of 
the new civilisation and fade away individually and racially. 
It is not incapacity for civilisation so much as dislike for it and 
love of the old that cause so often the abandonment of the 
newly-acquired culture by the ex-savage or ex-barbarian. Such 
relapses as that of the Aeta educated by the Archbishop of 
Manila ; the Brazihan Indian, who graduated from a medical 
college ; the young Kruman cited by Dr Barret ; the Fuegians 
of Captaia Fitzroy, etc., have been assigned an exaggerated 
importance in race psychology. In reaHty, the Robinson 
Crusoes, Pitcairn Islanders, hermits and relapsed ones of the 
great civilised races outw^eigh these and call for more explana- 
tion. Primitive peoples under the exact rule of our culture, 
young country recruits in the barracks, and school-children 
have much in common ; nostalgia and the melancholy phthisis 
that follows get a hold upon them, because, as Dr Lasegue has 
said, ' discipline, narrow subordination, impose upon them 
constantly depressing unrest and restraint.' Zaborowski, who 
cites Lasegue, compares with the recruits, who, besides the con- 
scious remembrance of their lost liberty, are under the pain 
of a new regime and a new milieu^ the school-children of the 
present day, who, 'intensely over-driven, come to present 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 299 

the same symptoms of depression.'. 'A savage, a soldier, a lover, 
a child best of all, knows what it is to be homesick, and to feel 
that loss of liberty which makes life scarcely worth the living, 
and for which all the ' advantages ' of so-called civilisation are 
but a mean compensation. 

The Savage^ the Child, and the Insa?ie. — That the mind 
of the savage must be characterised as insane is a view held by 
not a few recent writers, who are represented by Dr Friedmann, 
when he says ^ : ' The state of primitive thought is nothing more 
nor less than insanity, and has its parallel only in our asylums 
for mental diseases.' Reasoning by analogy, confusion of the 
real and the ideal, word-plays and figurative language are, 
however, even now too common normally among all races and 
conditions of men, to be regarded as evidences of an unsound 
mind. That the whole earth was once peopled by lunatics is a 
theory which the arts, the inventions, the institutions, the 
language of even the lowest races of mankind render absolutely 
untenable. No mere psycopath laid the foundations of 
astronomy, invented the boomerang, or changed the wild grass 
into the beautiful Indian corn. The earliest peoples, like 
so many normal individuals to-day, may have resembled the 
lunatic without sharing his lunacy, just as they have approached 
the genius without possessing his intellect, in both which 
respects they are nearer the child. 

In his volume on Sa?tity and Ijtsanity (423, p. 122), Dr 
Mercier says : ' A man who is unable to count above 5, who 
walks about naked coram populo, adorning his person only with 
feathers and tawdry ornaments, would ordinarily be called 
insane ; but if he has a black skin, and lives on the banks 
of the Congo, he is considered an average specimen of normal 
humanity.' Insane conduct, Dr Mercier tells us, 'cannot be. 
corrected,' and conduct he defines as ' the adjustment of 
the organism to the environment.' With this understanding, 
the savage is in no wise insane, even though insanity and 
kindred forms of mental disease may prevail, as some author- 
ities maintain, more commonly among savages and barbarians 
than among the higher races, and many of the comparisons 
and rapproche^nents instituted by the Italian schools of crim- 
inology and psychiatry, fall to pieces upon close examination. 
To a very great extent the same may be said of the parallel 
sought to be established, e.g., by Dr Clifford Allbut, between 
Science, N.S., IV. p. 357. 



300 THE CHILD 

the mentally diseased and the normal child — the view that the 
child is practically in an insane state of mind, though of a 
somewhat primitive sort. For Dr Allbut, children 'have in 
primary forms, what in complex and derived forms is the 
insanity of adults,' and the imagination of children is ' the 
vestibule of the insanity of adults.' But these writers exagger- 
ate the danger of 'the fairy dreams and pretty fancies of 
childhood,' their confusion of the real and the unreal, their 
seemingly absurd conceits of thought and expression. The 
child, who, never having seen such things before, but familiar 
with that wherewith she compared them, called a pot of 
beautiful fresh green ferns ' a pot of green feathers,' was 
far from being insane, making the very best use possible of the 
environment. So with many of the seeming quaint and 
curious observations of children recorded by Hartmann, Pre- 
sident Hall, Professor Brown, Professor Russell, and others 
who have studied ' the contents of children's minds,' ' the 
thoughts and reasonings of children,' etc. The law of 
evolution is being illustrated here instead of the unlaw of 
chaos. 

In a very suggestive article on 'Folk-Lore in Mental 
Pathology,' Dr Eugenio Tanzi, of Genoa, after discussing the 
general characteristics of persecutory delirium, panophobia, 
personification, rehgious delirium, delirium of ambition, erotic, 
hypochondriac delirium, logolatry, name and number prejudices 
and manias, paranoia, enigmas, conjurations, nomadism, incoher- 
ent episodes, double personalities, hallucinations, etc., comes to 
the following conclusions (626, p. 418) : 

'i. Delirium is determined by the apparition and the 
hegemony of given images and tendencies which are summed 
up in superstition and acquire the character of an ideative 
monospasm. 2. Like images and tendencies are met with as 
sole and uncontrasted manifestations of the intelligence in 
primitive man ; and they are inherited, but enfeebled and 
latent in more developed man. 3. Between the group of 
these primitive ideas and that of the more recent ideas there 
is in the complete and developed man a disparity of energy 
and an antagonism of function quite to the advantage of the 
latter. 4. The clinical genesis of delirium — whatever it may 
be — consists in the victory of the superstitious tendencies, 
which assume the upper hand. This modifies the type of 
intellectual constitution, which, developed and savage at one 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 3OI 

and the same time, degenerates into a real caricature and bears 
in its deformity the stamp of morbid origin. 5. The suprem- 
acy of the superstitious tendencies is effected in the paranoiac by 
a congenital prevalence of development, in the non-degenerate 
lunatic by a paralysis of the higher functions.' 

Mysticism, the one thing common to the savage, the 
normal man and the lunatic, is the one thing which, in the 
differing ways it obtains among them, distinguishes them from 
one another, and distinguishes the degenerate lunatic from the 
undegenerate. ' With primitive man,' says Tanzi, ' mysticism 
is the little treasure of a great poverty, the best he has in his 
brain, the fruit and the flower of his intelligence. For the 
uncivilised normal man it is a fettering of conscience, that 
portion of it which is ready to be lost, a mnemonic survival not 
far from being submerged in the unconscious. In the paranoiac 
it is the revival of an obsolescent function, what is re-born 
from the ruins, the defeated, rising again. In the non- 
degenerate lunatic it is the wretched residuum of a disaster, the 
little and the worse that disease has spared.' 

In other words, this mystical prejudice, diverse in its 
attributes, marks the brains of all men. In the savage it is 
monarch of all ; in the normal man it is reduced to a state 
of servitude, — a poetic tendency, or an accessory diversion 
of thought ; in the lunatic, either in its own strength as 
a victorious rebel, or by reason of paralysis of the opposite 
tendencies, as a last superstition, it becomes again the 
sovereign. 

The child, too, has parallel states of mind which are clearly 
seen in the phenomena of delusions and illusions, fads and 
fancies, questionings and dogmatisings, nonsense-talk, language- 
play, verbigeration, etc. Hallucination furnishes an interesting 
rapprochement: 'Children would not participate with such 
vivacity and interest in the fictions which constitute their 
games, if, in playing, they were not semi-hallucinated.' And 
primitive man likewise. 

The paranoiac, the child and the savage all vivify nature ; 
'with them,' to use Tylor's apt expression, 'anything is some- 
body ' ; every fact is a deed, nothing is authorless ; the dead 
are more alive even than the living ; night is no whit less 
empty than day, sky and sea than mountain and forest. Pride 
and morbid ambition also link together the paranoiac, the 
savage and the child. Tribe after tribe call themselves ' men,' 



302 THE CHILD 

'the people'; the paranoiac is 'Pope,' 'Emperor,' 'God'; 
children run through a gamut of higher personalities. The 
cult of the word, logolatry, verbigeration, neologism are 
common to child, savage and lunatic. The paranoiac has a 
delirium of speech ; many savage tribes lack general terms for 
elementary things, but revel in a wealth of synonyms, doublets, 
specifying words, etc., and verbs whose conjugation contem- 
plates all positions and attitudes. Children ' divert themselves 
with mere words, rhyming them, singing them, careless of their 
■ nonsensicalness. They invent words through very pleasure of 
verbigerating.' In like manner ' races in their childhood, in the 
new dehght of speech, neologise without regard to use or 
necessity, impoverishing their language by making it plethoric 
of synonyms ' (626, p. 404). 

Name-superstition is another thing that belongs to the 
psycopath, the child and the primitive races of men. In the 
names of self and of other beings the magic and the mystery 
of the word linger long. The child, the savage and the 
paranoiac love many names, like to change them, conceal them 
from strangers, etc. In his study of the neologisms of the 
insane, Tanzi comes to the conclusion that delusive ideas 
are innate, and formed for primitive peoples the highest 
expression of their normal thought, receding later with the 
growth of culture and intellectual development. This view 
of the inheritance of delusive ideas is not commended by 
Roncoroni. ^ 

Le Bon has little opinion of the reason and logic of children 
and primitive man. 'Let one try by reasoning,' he says (351, 
p. 132), 'to convince primitive minds — savages and children, 
for example — and he will realise the feeble value possessed by 
this method of argumentation.' Speaking of the child's failure 
to distinguish between the reason of an act and its form, 
Guyau observes (351, p. 38): 'This confusion of reason and 
form exists in a not less striking degree among savages and 
primitive peoples. And it is upon this confusion that is based 
the sacred character of religious rites.' 

Tarde, in his ' Social Logic,' notes many resemblances 
between the savage and the child in matters of feeling, belief, 
individual and social action. Children and savages seem 
always to have some fixed idea, some 'subject of privileged 
preoccupation,' and civilisation (like education) is often 
^ J^ev. Spe?'i77i., 1890, p. 33. 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 303 

impossible without an ' attenuation of beliefs.' Perhaps the 
greatest belief or faith of primitive man is language itself — 
nuinina nomina — though Tarde goes a little too far when he 
declares that ' the Bas-Breton speech has done more to hinder 
the assimilation of Brittany to France, than Christianity to aid 
it, (631, p. 11). Savages and children are ahke again in 
their tendency to ' receive all sorts of ideas, of entirely hetero- 
geneous origins, without thinking of making them harmonise 
one with another in the least.' The imagination of children is 
diverse like that of the primitive races of men, but all have 
borrowed largely from ' the Eden of dreams and the Hell of 
nightmare.' Tarde is not quite fair to the American Indian, 
when he thus sums up the imaginative nature of the savage : 
^' The Negro is imaginative but incoherent ; he combines 
rather than co-ordinates his thought. The Redskin has more 
sequence in his ideas, but has fewer of them. The Polynesian, 
superior to both, is already capable of systematising, dramatis- 
ing, organising.' With respect to attention : ' Prehistoric man, 
like the savages of to-day, and like children, must have been, 
when intelligent, very spontaneously attentive to articulate 
sounds, and, consequently, very well endowed for invention 
as well as for linguistic imitation (631, p. 80). 

Will and Personification. — The statement of Ribot (536, p, 
303) that ' for primitive man all is animate, full of arbitrary 
caprices, of desires, of intentions, and, particularly, of mysteries, 
because everything is unforeseen ; it is the reign of universal 
contingency,' is hardly justifiable in the light of the best and 
most recent studies of savage and barbarous hfe, 

/The savage's sense of will has been well described by Dr 
D. G. Brinton^ : ' To the primitive man, as we know him, the 
sense of individual power, that which metaphysicians call " free 
will" was very present. The strong, the mighty, was what 
excited his admiration above all else. His ideal was the man 
who could do what he wished or willed to do. The savage 
acknowledges no theoretic limit to the will any more than does 
the religious enthusiast. It can move mountains and consume 
rivers. It can act at indefinite distances, and its force is 
measureless. In the religion of ancient Egypt, the highest 
gods could be made to serve the will of a man did he but use 
the proper formula of command.' 

No better psychological essay has been written for some 
1 Science, N.S., IV. p. 488. 



304 THE CHILD 

time than Miss Alice 'Fletcher's ' Notes on Certain Beliefs 
concerning Will Power among the Siouan Tribes ' — a paper 
full of most suggestive facts, and a good antidote to much of 
the writing about primitive people to be found in many modern 
psychologies. It bears out much of what Dr Brinton has 
said. Like men of our own race, the Indian was conscious 
within himself of the power gr will that permeated the universe. 
The ' other-selves,' which primitive man, like the child, knew, 
possessed this will or power, 'dim or clear,' according as they 
were inanimate things, or men or gods. There is logic in what 
so many metaphysicians have chosen to term the illogic of the 
savage and the child. Both, at least, unified all nature by 
personifing it. 

Biese, in his Philosophy of the Metaphoric (54), discusses 
in great detail the parallel between the thought of the 
childhood of the individual and the childhood of the 
race, in so far as the personification of all nature and the 
animating of the inanimate are concerned. In savagery and 
modern philosophy, in barbarism and the highest religions, in 
no-culture and in all-culture, we find more or less evidence of 
belief in the ensouling of everything in the universe. The 
fancy of our children, the words of our lexicons, the myths we 
have not yet forgotten, the religions we profess, the art we 
preserve, the architecture we imitate, painting, sculpture, music, 
poetry, the philosophy of the metaphysicians and of the ignor- 
ant common people, bristle even yet with metaphors that tell 
the same tale. And when children and primitive peoples take 
these things for realities,' says Biese (54, p. 116), they are not 
utterly deceived. The child's instinct, the savage's naivete, 
the wisdom of the genius and the philosopher are one — the 
universe really is animate, ensouled, and man could not do 
otherwise than think it so. This ensoulment of all is the first 
unitary thought of mankind. In fact, the play of fancy fore- 
shadows the reality of experience. 

Not quite of the same sort is the opinion of Perez, who 
speaks of (486, p. 191): 'A primitive confusion which the 
child and the savage would make between the animate and 
inanimate. This confusion exists less still with the young 
civilised individual' than with the savage of to-day.' Most of 
the philosophical writers have, indeed, dismissed the question 
with much less attention and inquiry than even Perez has 
devoted to it. 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 305 

In her chapter on 'The Child's First Ideas/ Miss Lom- 
broso observes that 'these ideas are very imperfect, not be- 
cause his method of reasoning is imperfect, but just because 
the child judges rationally according to the data furnished 
him by his experience ' (369, p. 44). Thus ' when the child 
and the savage think the echo the voice of a human being, 
the image in the mirror a person, attribute life to a straw that 
moves, believe that God is warm or cold, or ask where the 
water goes that is evaporated, they are not putting forth un- 
reason, for they do not know, they cannot imagine, a series of 
causes and effects different from those which they observe every 
day.' Later, with the observation of many more things and 
facts, ' reasoning and the critical sense of things develops in 
them.' So also with other imperfect judgments of children. 
Their imperfect and absurd ideas about time and death ' are 
important to know, because they lie close to the beliefs of 
savages, and so give the explanation of primitive religions, 
shedding light also upon childish morals, upon that indiffer- 
ence to the loss of a loved individual, which we take to be 
insensibility, whereas, in truth, children, having no idea of 
death or of separation, cannot feel the pain we do from these 
events.' With the child, indeed, its reasoning is 'the result of 
all the factors of its intellectual life, and furnishes the way to 
find the incognita of its mental progress ' (369, p. 58). Much of 
the seeming incongruity of the savage's ideas, as of that of the 
first ideas of the child, is, in a sense, perfectly normal and 
natural, and arises from associations apt and fitting for the 
individual concerned. The recent studies of Ziehen and 
Ament have thrown much light upon the problems of the 
association of ideas in children ; a good study of the idea- 
associations of primitive peoples is yet a desideratum. 

Suggestion. — Guyau considers that the state of the child at 
the moment of birth is comparable to that of a hypnotised in- 
dividual — both are characterised by the same aideism (absence 
of ideas), or the same passive monoideism (domination of a 
single idea). All young children, moreover, are hypnotisable, 
and easily hypnotisable, remarkably open to suggestion and 
auto-suggestion. Further, ' all that the young child feels is a 
suggestion, which will give place to a habit, propagated some- 
times throughout life, as one sees perpetuated certain impres- 
sions of terror inculcated into children by their nurses' (259a, 
p. 16). 

U 



306 THE CHILD 

Dr Thomas, in his study of 'Suggestion' (636, p. 17), 
observes : ' If the child, more than the man does, yields so 
easily to all the suggestions of example, obeys sometimes the 
least impulse, it is because his power of reflection is still 
very feeble, it is because he has no marked personality, no 
profound habitudes, no fixed rules of conduct capable of 
orienting his life.' Not so true, however, is the statement 
which Dr Thomas makes concerning primitive man : ' The 
lower races resemble the child in this respect. The Fuegians, 
for example, have, if we are to believe the accounts of travellers, 
an aptitude for imitation so marvellous that they reproduce 
spontaneously the gestures .of persons who speak to them.' 
Not all lower races are so characterised at least. 

A further comparison Dr Thomas ventures with the men- 
tally and physically defective : ' The same facts, more or less 
attenuated, it is true, may be observed in the case of feeble 
minds, in the case of those who possess an organisation sickly, 
excessively impressionable, and suited to receive all imprints. 
Hence the mobility of their character ; hence, also, the abso- 
lute empire which certain persons have over them.' 

But here, as elsewhere, the normality of the savage, the 
immaturity of the child, the defect or degeneracy of the adult, 
interfere with the parallelism of the psychic facts. Many of 
the most interesting facts connected with the subject of hyp- 
notism and suggestion among primitive peoples may be read 
in Dr Stoll's valuable treatise, where the limitless role of sug- 
gestion among the lower races of men is fully exploited. 

Imitation.— Tho^ vast importance of imitation and its role 
in all the activities of childhood and adult life have been 
emphasised by all philosophers. Gustave Tarde, in his very 
suggestive volumes on ' The Laws of Imitation,' 'Social Logic,' 
etc., and Professor J. Mark Baldwin, in his Child a?td the Race, 
have very recently discussed the subject in masterly fashion. 

' Whenever there is question of contracts, services, con- 
straints,' says M. Tarde (628, p. vii.), 'we have to do with 
imitation. When man speaks, prays, fights, works, carves, paints, 
versifies, he does nothing but make new examples of verbal 
signs, of rites, of sword-blows or gun-shots, of industrial or 
artistic processes, of poetic forms, of models — in a word, 
objects of his imitation, spontaneous or obligatory, conscious 
or unconscious, voluntary or involuntary, intelligent or sheepish, 
sympathetic or odious, admiring or envious, but imitation 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 307 

always. It is the best touchstone for distinguishing what is 
social and what is vital. All that man does without having 
learned it by the example of others — walking, crying, eating, 
loving even, in the grossest sense of the term — is purely vital ; 
whilst walking in a certain way, in gymnastic step, waltzing, 
singing an air, preferring at table certain dishes of one's own 
country, and behaving there properly, courting according to the 
taste of the day a fashionable woman, all this is social. The 
inventor who inaugurates a new species of action, such as 
weaving by steam, telephoning, moving a carriage by electricity, 
performs himself a social work only in so far as he has com- 
bined old examples, and in so far as his combination is 
destined to serve as an example itself.' 

In another interesting volume M. Tarde takes up the brief 
of the other side, and in ' Universal Opposition ' has written 
of the rivalries, contrarieties, controversies, debates, contests, 
struggles, wars, destructiveness, spoliation, antitheses, contrasts, 
dissonances, contra-similitudes of all sorts, which seem to make 
in all stages of physical, vital, mental existence an eternally 
defiling succession of pairs of contraries, an endless war, an 
everlasting Manichsean day. The relation in which opposition, 
properly understood, stands with respect to sympathy, peace, 
solidarity, federation, love, goodness, harmony, imitation, etc., 
is thus epigrammatically stated (p. viii.) : ' Marriage alone is 
fecund, not the duel ; without the inventiveness of genius, 
daughter of the innate sympathy of man, the social melee would 
certainly not have sufficed to give origin to human progress.' 

' Imitation and Allied Activities ' forms the subject of the 
first volume of the Child Observations^ the data for which 
have been collected by the teachers and students of the 
Normal School at Worcester, Mass. Miss Haskell's volume — 
the interesting introduction is by Professor E. H. Russell — 
contains 1208 plain, unvarnished entries of child-phenomena 
of imitation (ages 1-3 years, 191 j ages 3-4, 129 ; ages 4-5, 130 ; 
ages 5-6, 121 j ages 6-7, 123 ; ages 7-8, 91 ; ages 8-9, 96 ; ages 
9-10, 82; ages lo-ii, 83; ages 11-12, 45; ages 12-16, 107) of 
all sorts and varieties, mechanical, sensory, motor, psychical, 
social, aesthetic, linguistic, artistic, moral, dramatic, vocal, etc. — 
an array of evidence which seems amply to justify the lines of 
Wordsworth which appear upon the title-page : 

' As if his whole vocation 
Were endless imitation.' 



3o8 THE CHILD 

These records have been charted out by Miss Caroline 
Frear, of Stanford University, to show the things or persons 
imitated, the sort of imitation, the exactness of the imitation, 
the persons with whom the child plays, and the proportionate 
imitation of action, speech, sound. Miss Frear calls attention 
to the fact that ' the proportion of imitation of adults (a pro- 
portion that increases with the age of the child) is far in excess 
of imitation of other children or of animals,' while the per- 
centage of imitation of things ' is too slight to merit representa- 
tion.' But many more studies and investigations are needed 
to make certain the interpretation of these results. With the 
years ' direct imitation ' (^ the more immediate, more instinctive, 
less voluntary, sometimes reflex, at all events impulsive imita- 
tion') decreases, while playing ('the more dramatic form of 
imitation ') increases. In the early years imitation of action 
preponderates over that of speech, suggesting (the author re- 
marks) that ' possibly in the early years too much is made of 
teaching language, and more attention should be given to hand 
and body activity,' though, here again, more data are required 
to make certain the point. Miss Frear notes also ' the increas- 
ing combination of dramatic speech with dramatic action, and 
the decreasing occurrence of playing by simple action alone.' 
The tendency for the child to play with adults ' is marked 
during the first year,' Avhile during the next two or three years 
' he is satisfied to play by himself,' a tendency which decreases, 
as ' with the development of the social instinct the tendency to 
play with other children increases rapidly and steadily,' and 
there are increasing numbers of groups of children playing 
together — a fact which, the author seems to think, ' may 
indicate that, while at first the child needs strong, authoritative 
control, yet, beginning perhaps at four, he needs more and 
more democratic association with his fellows, with its increased 
possibilities of self-direction ' (219). 

Taken altogether, these imitation-observations show how 
really human the young human being is, how far removed he 
is in many respects from the mere animal, how prophetic, 
rather than atavistic, are his actions and their goals of thought. 

Miss Frear's pedagogical suggestions are as follows : ' (a) The 
natural tendencies of children indicate that adaptations of adult 
occupations furnish healthy material for part of the activity of 
the kindergarten, {b) From the age of four or five years con- 
siderable play should be given to the free development of 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 309 

children in connection with their social instincts, [c) In the 
early years of school life action should be given a prominent 
place. The formal teaching of language should be subordinate. 
Verbal expression should be developed spontaneously in con- 
nection with action.' There is danger, however, in too much 
imitation, even under the best conditions. 

' The model is the death of all formative work,' says Heydner 
in his essay on the child-mind, for 'it is easier,' to use the 
words of Ansbacher, ' to make men out of children than to 
make children out of men.' In learning language, in coming 
to a knowledge of the differences between literary and col- 
loquial speech, between written language and home-dialect, in 
substituting new, strange words and phrases for the old familiar 
ones, the child is often in the position of the adult learner of 
a foreign idiom. ' To marry the written language with the 
dialect' — so that no bastard forms are generated — is, Hilde- 
brand remarks, one of the teacher's greatest tasks. 

Taboo. — If it were possible to exclude imitation and con- 
tamination as important factors in the regulation of child-life 
among the civilised races of to-day, one could see in the ' bar,' 
of plays and games, the reserve of boys before girls, and 
of children of both sexes before adults, with regard to their 
favourite games and amusements, their pet animals and little 
sanctuaries and hiding-places in the garret or the forest, the 
cellar or the hillside, their secret languages and their treat- 
ment of natural and artificial objects, many facts permitting a 
rapprochement with practices and usages of savage and bar- 
barous peoples all over the globe. But in childhood taboo is 
more of an incident or an accident than a system — due to a 
hundred independent causes rather than subject to one domi- 
nant idea or belief. In children we see the diverse elements, 
which, flowing together and becoming arrested, appear here 
and there all over the world as systems of 'thou shalt not' ; 
in childhood they are still in a state of flux, the systematising 
force of religion and society makes them stable in savagery 
and barbarism. A full sense of the results (famine, disease, 
death, war, earthquake, floods, etc.), of the violation of the 
taboo, such as children do not have, but savages always can 
have, is necessary for the taboo par excellence. Barroil, whose 
brief resume of taboo literature is very good, recognises the 
religious origin of the custom and its subsequent employment 
as a powerful social instrument in the hands of chiefs, castes. 



3IO THE CHILD 

secret societies, and other priniitive clubs and associa- 
tions (37). 

Brinton, looking on the taboo as one of the very earliest 
forms of 'the word from the gods,' thus notes its gradual 
development in diverse directions : ' The tabu extends its veto 
into every department of primitive life. It forbids the use of 
certain articles of food or raiment ; it hallows the sacred 
areas ; it lays restrictions on marriage, and thus originates 
what is known as the totemic bond ; it denounces various 
actions, often the most trivial and innocent, and thus lays the 
foundation for the ceremonial law. The penalty for the 
infraction of the tabu includes all that flows from the anger of 
the gods, reaching to death itself (77, p. 108). 

Mr E. S. Hartland, who has studied the taboo as it 
appears in fairy tales, remarks, with special reference to the 
sort dealing with ' swan maidens,' that ' among the more 
backward races the taboo appears generally simpler in form, 
or is absent altogether' (286, p. 325). If 'pre-social' man 
ever practised the taboo, he must have done so in an utterly 
naive and inconsequent fashion. Investigations of the ethical 
contents of children's minds and children's ideas of right and 
wrong, such as those of Mr F. W. Osborn, who in 1894 
studied some hundred boys and girls of the city of Brooklyn, 
from nine to eleven years of age, attending a public and 
a private school, and of Miss M. E. Schallenberger, whose 
paper embodies the results of the study of some 3000 answer 
papers of Californian boys and girls from six to sixteen years 
of age, afford us data to compare with the phenomena of the 
taboo among savage and barbarous races. Mr Osborn, who 
tells us that the child is chiefly appealed to by concrete acts, 
and that with both boys and girls of the age in question, obedi- 
ence takes the lead over truth as a virtue, observes further (467, 
p. 145) : ' With young children, right is what is permitted, 
and wrong is what is forbidden.' Miss Schallenberger says, 
among other things (564, p. 96): 'Young children judge of 
actions by their results [girls consider the why more than 
boys], older ones look at the motives which prompt them. If 
a young child disobeys a command, and no bad result follows, 
he doesn't see that he has done wrong.' 

Some sort of parallelism holds here between the child and 
primitive man, as the prominent place assigned to disobedience 
in children's stories, and the innumerable legends of savage and 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 3II 

barbarous races as to 'man's first disobedience,' further indi- 
cate. In many ways the taboo is as important in the child- 
hood of the individual as it is in the childhood of the race. It 
is, however, true that the children of primitive races (like the 
adults) are not so fond of disobeying as seem to be their 
fellows in civilised communities. The following statement of 
Mr Curr (136, I. p. 54) concerning the loyalty of the 
Australians to these irksome restraints emphasises what has 
been said above : ' Now the question is, what is the hidden 
power which secures the black's scrupulous compliance with 
custom in such cases ? What is it, for instance, which 
prompts the hungry black boy, when out hunting with the 
white man, to refuse (as I have often seen him do) to share 
in a meal of emu flesh, or in some other sort of food forbidden 
to those of his age, when he might easily do so without fear 
of detection by his tribe? What is it that makes him so 
faithfully observant of many trying customs ? 

' My reply is, that the constraining power in such cases is 
not government, whether by chief or council, but education; 
that the black is educated from infancy in the belief that 
departure from the customs of his tribe is inevitably followed 
by one at least of many evils, such as becoming early grey, 
ophthalmia, skin eruptions, or sickness ; but, above all, that 
it exposes the offender to the danger of death from sorcery. 
As to the inducements which the males of mature years had 
originally, and still have, for instilling such beliefs into the 
minds of the young, they are not far to seek, as by this course 
they secure themselves the choicest articles of food, as well as 
other advantages.' 

Fear of consequences and of sorcery have declined in the 
last few centuries, and the child of cultured parents to-day 
lacks that faith in the words of his elders the child had of old, 
and the taboo is broken with impunity, for the punishments 
are not now so certain and so sure to follow from the vengeance 
of the injured powers. 

According to Schurz (582), who has studied the 'food 
taboo,' the fact that it concerns much more flesh items than 
plant items is a hereditary phenomenon ; man, like the 
monkey, was originally vegetarian only, and long after the 
passage to flesh-eating took place, the old vegetarian instinct 
asserted itself here and there in the pronounced antipathy to 
certain flesh-foods. Sociological, religious, metaphysical 



312 THE CHILD 

reasons, however, in later times, account for the taboo of 
particular animals, parts of animals, etc., as it did also of 
course for certain plants and parts of plants. Fasting, Schurz 
thinks, is the reflection (part custom, part foresight) of famine 
experienced. 

Ostracism, of which classical institution of ancient Greece 
an excellent account has been published by Garofalo (237), is, 
like the referendum, an old-time weapon of children in their 
play, and assuredly no politician ever felt worse over the ver- 
dict of the city that exiled him than the child over the decision 
of his playmates. No Greek was ever more completely 
ostracised by his fellows than is to-day the child who is perso?ta 
7ion grata to his fellows. Street gangs can banish as effectively 
as ever did a Hellenic city. 

At the beginnings of child-life it is the parents and the 
immediate milieu who exercise the taboo, and imitation is 
made to begin with life itself. The role of imitation is well 
exemplified in Mrs W. S. Hall's First 500 Days of a Child's 
Life, in reference to which Mrs K. C. Moore observes,^ 'there 
is not a case on record in which the child took an initiative, or 
launched on a wholly independent line of action.' So, too, 
with the older child, even among primitive peoples. 

Says Miss Alice C. Fletcher, in her interesting Glimpses of 
Child Life among the Omaha Litdiafis : ' The Indian child is 
born in an atmosphere charged with the myths of his ances- 
tors. The ceremonies connected with his infancy, his name, 
and later on his dress and games, are more or less emblematic 
of the visible forms of the powers which lie around man and 
beyond his volition. This early training makes easy the beHefs 
and practices of the adult, even to the extravagances in- 
dulged in by the so-called medicine-men' (213, p. 115). 

Childre7t's Ambitions a7td Primitive Ldeals. — Mr J. J. Jegi, 
summing up the general results of the tests of some 8000 
school children in New York by J. P. Taylor, in California by 
Miss H. M. Willard, in Massachusetts by Will S. Monroe, and 
in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, by himself, as to their 'hopes,' 
'ambitions,' 'vocational interests,' etc., observes (315, p. 139) : 
' In these four studies alone we have tested about 8000 school 
children, and there appears to be a wonderful agreement in all 
of them, as well as in the many smaller groups tested, in 
regard to the types of occupations that are most popular 

1 Psychol. Rev., 1S97, p. 558. 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 313 

during the earlier years of school life. The trades involving 
a large share of 'doing with the hands,' 'making,' as carpentry, 
engineering, farming, etc., are most sought by the boys, and 
teaching, dressmaking, millinery and housekeeping by the 
girls.' This result, Mr Jegi notes, cannot be due to the teach- 
ing of manual training or of sewing, for the majority of the 
children in question do not take either of these, even when 
they happen to be taught in the schools. Mr Jegi concludes 
that ' certainly from the age of twelve years children are 
making a conscious introspection of their talents, and the 
teacher cannot afford to neglect this opportunity for good.' 
Noticeable also is predominance of ' like it ' as the reason 
assigned for the favourite occupation, even in America money 
influencing less than is commonly supposed. 

With these ideals of childhood it is interesting to compare 
the facts and ideals of savagery and barbarism. The first god 
and the first poet were 'makers,' and the great heroes of 
primitive peoples have alv,ays been handicraftsmen, artificers, 
who fashioned things, wrought, laboured, etc. As the present 
writer has pointed out in his study of the ' Mythology and 
Folk-Lore of Invention' (108, p. 90): 'In the languages of 
many peoples " God " is simply " the creator, maker, fashioner, 
framer, builder," and the translations of the first verse of the 
first chapter of Genesis into primitive tongues reveal Him as 
the first artist in many diverse spheres of invention. As 
Andrew Lang notes, the Polynesian god and goddess to-day, 
like the classic deities of Greece and Italy, are departmental 
in character — hunters, smiths, potters, etc. In the legends of 
the Quiches of Guatemala, according to Dr D. G. Brinton,^ 
" the Supreme Being is called Bitol, the substantive form of 
bit, to make, to form, and Tzakol, substantive form of tzak, to 
build, the Creator, the Constructor " ; and the creation-legends 
of American and other primitive peoples tell of the divine 
artist who, like the Hebrew Jhvh and the old god of the 
Greeks, fashioned men (and animals) out of clay, carved them 
out of stone or wood, or remodelled them from existing things, 
plants and animals, and often taught somewhat of these arts 
to the first men and women.' 

Primitive mythology is largely concerned with the way the 
gods use their hands, their carving, sculpturing, engineering 
exploits, on the one hand, and with the accomplishments in 
1 Myths of New World, 3rd ed.^ 1896, p. 74. 



314 THE CHILD 

the household arts and inventions, dressmaking, etc., of the 
female deities, in whom is incarnated the great fact of ' woman 
the teacher,' as Professor O. T. Mason has so ably shown. 

Sense of the Body with Children afid Savages. — In the early 
life-history of the individual and in that of the race the body 
plays a most important role, as indeed the etymology of our 
common terms, sojuebody, aiiybody, nobody, everybody, and 
cognate expressions in other languages suggests, while corre- 
sponding words in which soul might figure have not yet 
appeared in pronominal form in our speech. We do, however, 
as several kindred languages do also, employ ' soul ' in the 
sense of 'individual' or 'person,' and it is at least curious 
that perhaps its most common use is in connection with 
disasters at sea ('every soul perished'), since water, among so 
many primitive peoples, is inimical to the human soul. 
Strangely enough we use ' body ' in the sense of ' corpse,' 
which last word we have limited to the meaning of 'dead 
body,' except in the case of its other spelHng, 'corps,' which 
signifies 'a body of live men.' 

One of the most interesting chapters in the history of 
human thought is concerned with the development of the 
power ' to believe and think with all we are, body as well as 
sensibility and intelligence,' as M. Jules Payot puts it (479, 
p. III). When man had come to be conscious of himself, 
he 'created gods in his own image,' and spoke unto his 
fellows, ' Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart, and with all thy mind, and with all thy soul, and with 
all thy strength.' And not yet have the gods ceased to be 
the embodiment of man. Robinsohn, whose Psychology of 
Primitive Peoples contains a chapter on the form of the soul 
(539j PP- 37"54)j observes: 'Even where the distinction 
between soul and body is accentuated strongly, the first 
appears in human shape.' Greek philosophy sought to refine 
the soul, but Greek folk-thought gave it the form of a beautiful 
woman or of a butterfly. 

Says Professor Fullerton : ^ ' And from the crude material- 
ism of the infant to the crude animism of the savage the step 
is but a short one. That duplicate of the body, which in 
dreams walks abroad, sees and is seen, and acts as the body 
acts, has simply taken the place of the body as knower and 
doer, and its knowing and doing obtain their significance in 
^ Psychol. Rev., IV. p. 23. 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 315 

the same experience. The thought of the child is dupHcated 
in the new world opened up by the beginnings of reflection.' 

L^Thoreau, whose vegetarianism expresses itself in the 
declaration that ' the human race in its gradual improvement 
[will] leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes 
have left off eating each other when they come in contact 
with the more civiHsed,' says also, rather dogmatically (638, 
p. 214), that 'the gross feeder is a man in the larva state; 
and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without 
fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them.' 
Like the insects, men in their perfect state eat less than in 
their larval condition ; the butterfly stage is not only more 
beautiful but less voracious than the caterpillar. Thus judged, 
the child lingers long in the company of the savage. A 
prominent abdomen is a noticeable characteristic alike of 
children, women, and many primitive races; a ' pot-bellied ' 
child and a 'pot-bellied ' savage are common enough. This 
prominence of the belly in the physical organism of man has 
been reflected in the vocabularies of primitive peoples. In 
more than one such language ' forehead ' = ' belly of the face ' ; 
' palm ' = ' belly of the hand'; 'instep ' = ' belly of the foot'; 
' inside ' = ' belly of the house.' 

In terms of bodily names men and women are lower in 
the scale of being than they are from the point of view of 
comparative anatomy or psychology. The prominence of 
abdomen and stomach, the parallelism of hand and foot, 
lingered longer in language than in the person of man him- 
self. Here, too, physical evolution has often run far ahead of 
psychical evolution — names are much more conservative than 
the things they designate. And the terminology of primitive 
peoples is not seldom remarkably similar to that of the children 
of to-day. We yet lack a study of the names of the organs 
and parts of the body, though here and there in a few extra- 
European languages the beginnings of such research appear. 

In counting especially, with primitive peoples as with 
children, the body and its organs are utilised — repeated per- 
haps in some of the counting-out games and lullabies of 
the nursery and playground. Some of the lower races em- 
ploy almost all the members of the outward body in their 
systems of enumeration. The Murray Islanders, of Torres 
Straits, New Guinea,^ e.g., who are said to possess but 
^ louTJi. Anthr. Inst., N.S., I. p. 13. 



3l6 THE CHILD 

two numerals {?ietat, ' one,' neis, ' two '), count higher than 
that by reduplication, and can reach 31 by reference to 
certain parts of the body. They begin with the little finger 
of the left hand, enumerating the various fingers, the wrist, 
the elbow, the armpit, the shoulder, the hollow above the 
clavicle, the thorax, and then down the right arm in similar 
reverse order to the little finger of the right hand — this, 
■ together with the ten toes, giving them the sum required. 

Counting. — Fingers and toes the savage and the child 
count with ad libitum, and the parallel between the two is 
very interesting. Professor Levi L. Conant, in his exhaustive 
study of the origin and development of number-expression, 
speaks thus of finger-counting : ' But the one primitive method 
of counting which seems to have been almost universal 
throughout all time is the finger method. It is a matter of 
common experience and observation that every child, when 
he begins to count, turns instinctively to his fingers ; and with 
these convenient aids as counters tallies oif the little number 
he has in mind. This method is at once so natural and 
obvious that there can be no doubt that it has always been 
employed by savage tribes since the first appearance of the 
human race in remote antiquity. All research among un- 
civilised peoples has tended to confirm this view, were 
confirmation needed of anything so patent.' 

The ' invariable exception ' crops out, however, for the 
author goes on to say : ' Occasionally some exception to this 
rule is found, or some variation, such as is presented by the 
forest tribes of Brazil, who, instead of counting on the fingers 
themselves, count on the joints of the fingers. 

As the entire number-system of these tribes appears to be 
limited to thj^ee, this variation is no cause for surprise (124, p. 7). 

As to method in finger-counting, Dr Conant fails to find 
any markedly uniform law of beginning either in children or in 
the civiHsed, but ' very young children have a slight, though 
not decided, preference for beginning with the thumb,' and 
'more civilised people begin with the little finger than with 
the thumb.' Savages, however, ' nearly always begin with the 
little finger of the left hand' (124, pp. 11-14). 

Out of 206 children examined in the five different primary 
rooms in the public schools of Worcester, Mass., 57 began 
with the little finger and 149 with the thumb — a result the 
significance of which is reduced, the author thinks, by the fact 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 317' 

that 'children of this age, four to eight years, will count in 
either way, and sometimes seem at a loss themselves to know 
where to begin.' Imitation also is an important interfering 
factor. With age the tendency of young children ' to hold the 
palm of the hand downward, and then begin with the thumb ' 
disappears, and ' at the age of twelve or thirteen the tendency is 
decidedly in the direction of beginning with the little finger. 
Fully three-fourths of all persons above that age will be found 
to count from the little finger toward the thumb, thus reversing 
the proportion that was obtained in the primary school-rooms 
examined.' 

Another interesting point brought out by Professor Conant 
is the fact (' the outgrowth of the universal right-handedness of 
the human race'), that in finger-counting, 'whether among 
children or adults, the beginning is made on the left hand, 
except in the case of left-handed individuals ; and even then 
the start is almost as likely to be on the left hand as on the 
right.' The thumb-preference in early childhood may possibly 
be due to the early acquaintance with that member of the 
hand when the child is in the 'thumb-sucking period.' 

Child Ideas a?id Primitive Mythology. — The thoughts and 
questionings of the growing self in the child may well be studied 
in connection with the primitive cosmologies and mythologies, 
the developing consciousness of the race compared with that of 
the individual. Among the many questions asked of them- 
selves or of others by young children, as reported by President 
Hall in his suggestive paper on the sense of self in children, 
are the following, which might readily enough stand as texts 
for many of the myths and tales of savage and barbarous 
peoples (275, p. 364): I. Why do we breathe? Do animals, 
plants, God, etc., breathe? What is breath? 2. How could I 
get out of my skin ? How would I look if I were out of my 
skin ? Could I get out of my skin and another get in ? 3. 
Why am I John or Henry ? How funny it would be if I were 
Edward or Robert ! 4. Is it real, or am I dreaming ? How do 
I know it's real ? Am I real, or only make-believe like dolls ? 
5. Why can't I see myself think when I close my eyes ? What 
do I do when I think ? What is it makes my legs walk ? 6. 
Why am I the same as I was when a baby ? What makes me 
the way I am ? Why am I not she, or why is not he me ? If 
papa had married B., whose girl would I have been? What 
name would I have had if C. had been my mother? 7. Why 



3l8 THE CHILD 

was I not M. (another girl born the same day) ? 8. Am I not 
a dog straightened out ? What was I before I came into the 
world ? You wanted a boy, but did not know it was going to 
be me. I am glad it was papa who found me before anyone 
else, for they might have changed me. 9. Why are w^e in the 
world, anyhow"? 

Here we have a matrix out of which might easily come 
the observation-myths and explanation-myths of the American 
Indians, the Poiirqiioi of French folk-lore, and a mass of 
similar primitive human thought all over the world. Egger 
exaggerates, however, when he writes : ' In the pupils of seven 
or eight years we have beneath our eyes a Hindoo of the Vedic 
age, a Greek of the time of Homer, a Hebrew of the time of 
Moses' (181, p. 93). 

The following sayings and phrases of children, recorded in 
the Russell-Haskell collection, are in type and character such 
as to invite comparison with the frame-work of the folk-lore 
and legends of primitive peoples all over the globe (291, 
PP- i9> 29, 35, 21, 23, 19, 42, 44, 46, 136) :— 

1. [5 or 6 yrs.]. Jennie said, 'What makes people sleepy?' 
Hilda repHed, ' Those little hairs on your lids. Every time 
they come against your eye, they make you sleepy.' 

2. [3 yrs.]. When the hot water faucet is first turned on, 
the w^ater spouts out in jets. S. was in the kitchen when her 
mother turned on the hot water, and she exclaimed, 'Oh, 
mamma, the water is choked ; see how it coughs ! ' 

3. [4 yrs.]. J., seeing the water running in the gutter, 
exclaimed, ' Oh ! the water is awake now ; it was asleep last 
night.' 

4- [5 y^s.]. Mabel and her mother were walking in a 
pasture. They came to a very crooked tree, and Mabel said, 
' Oh ! see that tree sitting down ! ' 

5. [11 yrs. 5 mos.]. E. 'Oh! sir, they've plastered that 
tree (meaning a white birch). /. 'What makes you think so?' 
E. ' Because when I rubbed my hand on it, the white comes 
off on it. See ! There's a limb that's black, where they forgot 
to plaster.' 

6. [2 yrs. 8 mos.]. The first time F. noticed the moon it 
was full. Soon after, she saw it during the first quarter and 
ran to her mother, saying, ' Oh, mamma ! G. [her little 
brother] has meddled wdth the moon.' 

7. [4 yrs.]. S. and I were sitting out of doors one evening, 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 319 

and S. happened to see the moon come out from behind a 
cloud. 'See, see,' she cried, 'the moon has waked up.' The 
next evening was cloudy, and, as we were standing by the 
window, I said, ' Where is the moon to-night, S. ? ' — ' Oh ! ' she 
replied, 'it is asleep, and hasn't waked up yet.' Then, after a 
pause, ' I guess it's tired to-night.' 

8. [5 or 6 yrs.]. L., being asked one cloudy day what 
made the sky so grey, answered, 'Ashes.' 

9. [5 yrs., II mos.]. Child. 'I know what makes the 
^ skyj it's the smoke.' He had been riding in the cars, and 
^noticed the smoke rising from engines. 

10. [5 yrs., 7 mos.]. F. ' Is this sponge an animal, 
mamma?' Mother. 'Yes.' F. 'I can see where they shot 
him ' (pointing to one of the largest holes in the sponge). 

11. [6 yrs.]. A. was away from home and was shown some 
ducks a few days old. She said, ' Why don't you have their 
feet unsewed ? ' 

12. [6 yrs.]. I was walking along the street with J., and, 
as it was cold, he could see his breath. After looking at it a 
while he turned to me and said, ' Look ! I am good, 'cause 
my breath goes up to heaven.' 

13. [7 yrs.]. H. 'I think I can tell you something about 
animals.' /. 'Well, what is it?' H. ^\ have thought what 
makes animals stick up their tails when men go to hunt them 

/with a lasso or a gun. If they sticked them straight out the 
J men could catch hold of it.' 

14. [7 or 8 yrs.]. R. was looking at my geology; he finds 
the picture of an elephant's skeleton, and asks what that is. 
'An elephant.' — 'Oh! yes, an elephant without its clothes.' 

/'After, he said, 'Skin is clothes.' 

^ 15. [7 yrs. 2 mos.]. Louis said, 'This is the sun.' He 

stood up straight, squinted his eyes, and drew up his mouth at 
the corners. Then he turned round and round. 

An interesting summary of the more recent literature relat- 
ing to the cosmologic and cosmogonic ideas of primitive 
peoples, useful for comparison with such data as those cited 
above, is given by von Andrian (10, p. 128). The author 
looks upon these myths and legends as not merely 'metaphors, 
symbols, products of linguistic confusion, plays of an unbridled 
imagination, etc.,' but the first products of the necessity to 
explain, strongly developed even among the primitive peoples, 
the very real expressions, to be taken literally, of man in the 



320 THE CHILD 

presence of nature often completely dominating his social life 
and colouring all other products of his mental activities. Other 
very valuable data for comparative study are to be found in the 
extended discussion of cosmological ideas, religious and philo- 
sophical conceptions of primitive peoples, published in 1898 
by Dr L. Frobenius. 

Orophily. — The orophily, the delight in being upon a mound, 
a height, a hill, and commanding the universe around, or 
merging oneself into it, or of looking up at the hill-tops where 
they seem to touch the clouds or the blue sky itself, and feeling 
oneself irresistibly drawn towards them — Ruskin's love of hill- 
scenery, Byron's high-mountain feeling, Shakespeare's heaven- 
kissing hill, etc. — are familiar phenomena of the psychic life of 
later childhood, a part, perhaps, of that ' nature-love,' which 
some, with Mr Hoyt, would have us consider alike the source 
of the rich and full mythologies of primitive people and the 
very vital myth-world of childhood, the inspiration of true 
science and true religion (306). 

The height-cult (reverence and worship of hill and moun- 
tain) of humanity has been made the subject of an extended 
study by von Andrian, dealing especially with the peoples of 
Asia and of Europe (12). The author recognises two funda- 
mental ideas as lying at the bottom of the world-wide cult of 
eminences, hills, crags and mountains : i. The animistic (the 
mountain is alive, a being of power and might, a spirit, and his 
dwelling-place) — a belief which, as the unnumbered European 
legends of ' mountain-spirits ' show, survives long even among 
the civilised races of man ; 2. The cosmic (hills and mountains 
are ' steps unto heaven ' ; the boundary between heaven and 
earth ; the entrances to heaven ; the bearers-up of heaven ; the 
intermediaries as to light, clouds, etc., between heaven and 
earth, the gods and men ; the seat of heaven and the dwelling- 
place of the gods, Olympus ; the image and symbol of the 
universe, the world-mountain, the earthly Paradise, etc.). The 
first of these conceptions seems to be the most widespread and 
is probably the older, while the variety of mountain-scenery 
and the extent and diversity of mountain-life, have permitted 
all sorts of connections and rapprochements with the mythology 
and folk-lore of forest and lea, fountain, lake and stream, plant, 
stone and beast. Many primitive peoples, like so many 
children to-day, have a quick eye, as their mountain-names 
and the incidents in their myths reveal, for the resemblances 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 32 1 

between the form and outlines of mountains, etc., and the 
shape of man or beast or the various organs of either. This 
animistic view of the mountain stands out from beneath the 
superincumbent mythologic ideas of later ages as original and 
springing ultimately from the common animism-fund of primi- 
tive man. The cosmic concept, the author thinks, is not so 
widely prevalent, nor so original with the races of men, has 
been more frequently transferred from people to people, and 
more divergently developed in various parts of the world than 
the animistic, and also more subject to special development by 
particular tribes or nations. That the cosmic follows the 
animistic concept of hill and mountain in the evolution of the 
individual, as in that of the race, is very probable, although a 
paralleHsm of origin and development is not at all impossible. 

Analogy. — Professor Joseph Jastrow ^ calls attention to the 
great role of this principle in the intellectual products of savage 
and barbarous peoples — omens, divination, dream-interpretation, 
folk-medicine, doctrine of signatures, astrology, magic arts, etc., 
and in the mental life of the ignorant classes among civilised 
peoples, together with the child as representing the first begin- 
nings of the human race. As Jastrow remarks : ^ ' That children 
are fond of reasoning by analogy there can be no doubt ; their 
confusion of fact with fancy ; their lack of scientific knowledge 
and the ability to refer effects to proper causes j their great love 
for sound effects and play of words, the earnestness of their 
play-convictions — all these furnish a rich soil for the growth of 
such habits of thought as we are now considering ' (313, p. 341). 
But the case is by no means so clear as many writers have 
supposed, for : ' On the other hand, the influence of their adult 
companions, of their civilised surroundings, of the growth of 
the make-believe sentiment by which the laws of the real world 
are differentiated from those of fairy-land, make it difficult to 
pronounce as an argument by analogy what may really be a 
half-conscious play of fancy or jugglery of words and ideas.' 
And these words apply to the consideration of analogy as 
present in the thought-products of savagery, except that in 
most cases the civilised surroundings have long been absent, or 
only recently present. 

Dr Jastrow goes on to say : 

' When I admit that I found extreme difficulty in collecting 

^ In his address (before the American Association for the Advancement 
of Science, 1891) on 'The Natural History of Analogy.' 

X 



322 THE CHILD 

even passable arguments by analogy in children, I must accom- 
pany the admission with the conviction that the difficulty is due 
to the absence of good collections of children's original and 
typical sayings and doings. What fond parents are apt to 
observe, and newspaper paragraphers to record, are sayings 
that amuse by a quaintness or their assumption of a worldly 
wisdom beyond their years, while the truly suggestive traits 
pass unrecorded for lack of psychologically informed ob- 
servers. 

' The little boy who, when asked his age, said he was nine 
when he stood on his feet but six when he stood on his head, 
because an inverted 9 makes a 6, was certainly reasoning by 
analogy, however little faith he may have had in the correct- 
ness of his reasoning. The children who believe that butter 
comes from butterflies, and grass from grasshoppers, beans 
from bees, and kittens from pussy-willows (Stanley Hall), may 
be simply misled by sound - analogies, but when Sir John 
Lubbock tells us of a little girl saying to her brother, "If 
you eat so much goose you will be quite silly," and adds that 
" there are perhaps few children to whom the induction would 
not seem perfectly legitimate," we appreciate that such argu- 
ments, so closely paralleling the superstitions of savages, may 
be more real to children than we suspect.' 

The ever-increasing literature of ' child-study ' seems to 
furnish much evidence tending to show that such children, 
by no means few in the land, are much more naive than the 
barbarian or the savage. 

Symbolis7?i. — That ideas and symbols are often much slower 
to change than social facts and conditions is, as Ferrero points 
out, amply illustrated by the evolution of marriage, the story of 
the duel and the ordeal, in fact by legal formalities in general. 
The evolution of such human institutions teaches anew ' the 
truth that they are not created by man according to a precon- 
ceived idea and plan, or with a clear consciousness and know- 
ledge of the definite ends towards which his activity is tending.' 
According to Ferrero : ' It was not the ideas of contract or of 
judicial discussion that, in marriage and primitive lav/-process, 
substituted purchase and judgment for capture and the duel, but 
purchase and judgment substituted for capture and the duel, 
caused gradually to arise in the human mind, by slow sug- 
gestion, the idea of contract and of judicial discussion.' 
Hiiman ideas are, in fact, no more logical than other natural 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 323 

phenomena ; Nature herself burdens a plant or an animal for 
ages with a useless organ or a troublesome excrescence; she 
is like man, who keeps the impedimenta (in institutions, symbols, 
etc.) of dead and decadent civiHsations or extinct barbarisms. 
The lack of logic, which many have thought to be character- 
istic of the child, or of primitive people, has been attributed 
by the philosopher Ardigo to the human race as a whole ; the 
child is only a little less logical (often a great deal more) than 
his father or his mother, the savage by no means necessarily 
less so than the civilised man or woman (199, pp. 163-185). 

The 'dangers of symbolic interpretation' have been 
emphasised by Colonel Garrick Mallery.^ The cross, the 
numbers 4, 7, 12, the algebraic symbols, the arbitrary signs of 
arithmetical notation, have had read into them a world of 
mysticism, equalled only by some of the achievements of 
children, who see in letters of the alphabet and the arithmetical 
numbers o-io all sorts of animated beings and objects in 
nature. Dr D. G. Brinton, ^ in his study of the origin of 
sacred numbers, holds that 'the associations which attach 
sacredness to these numbers [3, 9, 33; 4, 7, 13, etc.] arise in 
the human mind, of the same character, everywhere and at 
all times, so that no theory of borrowing is needed to explain 
identities or similarities in this respect.' In the repetition- 
games and rhymes of children something of this numeral 
sacrosanctity inheres. With this tendency to sameness in the 
selection of sacred numbers by the races of men it is interesting 
to contrast the ' endless diversity ' and ' mutual unintelligibility ' 
of the diagrams ('number forms,' calendar-schemes, etc.), by 
means of which the succession and interrelation of the numerals, 
the days of the week, the days of the months, the months and 
seasons of the year, the years of the century, the centuries of 
the Christian era, the letters of the alphabet, are usually 
recorded in the mind by many people old and young. The 
proportion of individuals having such forms seems to vary 
with nationality, sex, age, etc. Women possess them rather 
more frequently (in the proportion of 8 to 7), while the percent- 
age decreases somewhat with age (adults averaging i in 15, 
children i in 12). The subject has been investigated by 
Galton, Flournoy, Patrick, Miss Calkins and others, and very 
recently by Dr D. E. Phillips (492, p. 507), whose article 

^ Trans, Anthr. Soc, Washington, Vol. I. pp. 'Ji-'jg. 
2 Amer. Anthi'op.^ VIH. p. 168. 



324 " THE CHILD 

summarises the data and theories about 'number forms,' with 
the addition of some new contributions. According to Dr 
Phillips, children have more week and month forms than 
adults, while many individuals have more than one form of 
some kind, and others have month-forms, week-forms, etc., 
but no number-forms. Of course, the clock, blackboard, slate, 
book, block, multipHcation - table, chart, etc., in the school- 
room or at home, are often found to have suggested some of 
these forms, so also, perhaps, counting on the fingers and other 
primitive mathematical devices, but since so many children 
'can count loo before they learn to recognise anything written 
or printed,' the origin of very many 'number-forms' must be 
placed at a very early period of childhood, and their utility 
during school-life is often clearly apparent, although many em- 
ploy them 'just as we use language, without ever thinking that 
they are useful as a medium of thought.' It is not certain that 
these forms are to be found more commonly among more 
imaginative or more intellectually active individuals, or among 
those mathematically-gifted than among other classes of people, 
and some of them ' may originate quite late in life, becoming 
much elaborated by use and time.' Dr Phillips holds that 
' nearly all persons possess some idea of extension of num- 
bers, more or less indefinite,' and asks, 'Can early association 
explain this tendency to cast the number series into spatial 
form ? ' — making the existence of number-forms another justi- 
fication for the ' general tendency to base primary mathematics 
again (Euclid-wise) more and more on geometry.' 

Imagination. — Long ago Plutarch wrote concerning children 
that they are 'better pleased with the sight of rainbows, comets, 
and those halos that encircle the sun and moon than to see the 
sun and moon themselves in their splendour,' and there are 
primitive peoples and portions of all civilised communities 
also, who, like children, are ' taken with riddles, abstruse words 
and figurative speeches.' ^ 

The imagination of the child, according to Miss Lombroso 
(369, p. 149), is 'not the effect of a great intellectual energy, 
but proceeds rather (and it is this that characterises it) from 
a defect of energy, from the lack of inhibition, for which reason 
the thought goes by leaps and bounds, by casual associations 
of words and ideas.' In other terms: 'The child does not 
invent or create anything new and original, but, being exces- 
1 Morals, Vol. HI. p. 103. 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 325 

sively suggestionable, passes with the greatest facihty from one 
impression to another.' This characterises his early writings 
no less than it does his early speech. In the writings of 
children at this period (5-7 years) an unbridled imagination 
and a clear, exact sense of observation are the chief peculi- 
arities : ' With his new mind, burning before every fact, the 
child finds himself, as it were, before a new scene that excites 
him, sharpens his attention, and for him examining things and 
cataloguing them in his little head, are a sort of easy and 
diverting play. He observes, too, many things that escape 
us, with whom seeing them so often has dulled our interest in 
them.' Often his imagination lets him wander away on the 
paths of the strangest associations of ideas, and his observation 
becomes so minute and exact as to resemble an auctioneer's 
catalogue or an anatomical inventory ; often, too, feeling and 
art are but scantily represented, being the last, in reality, to 
manifest themselves here. Guyau observes (259a, p. 147) : 
/' The child retains and reproduces images much more than he 
invents and thinks.' 

According to Andrew Lang ^ ' the early form of human 
fancy, the form conspicuous among backward races, peasants, 
fishers and children, is undeniably the source of all the civilised 
poetry and romance,' for ' early man, and simple, natural men 
and children regard all nature as animated.' Dickens, Lang 
thinks, shows in his genius ' a relapse on the early human intel- 
lectual condition. He sees all things in that vivid, animated 
way, and inanimate objects play living parts in his books more 
frequently than in any other modern works, except Hans 
Andersen's fairy tales.' Moreover, the imagination of Dickens 
* at times went back to what is probably the primitive condi- 
tion of actual hallucination,' and his dreams were 'wonderfully 
distinct and coherent.' He possessed also an 'intense power 
of imaginative vision and audition. He saw his characters, 
and heard them speak ... he thought in pictures, not in 
words. . . . His fancy acted with the freshness of the morning 
of the world.' 

That the genius of Lewis Carroll and Edw^ard Lear, who 
have entertained so many children of both the larger and the 
smaller growth, lies almost within the grasp of childhood itself 
is proved by books like Animal Land (128), wherein, with the 
mother's assistance, are recorded the 'impossible animals,' their 
^ Littel's Living Age, CCXX. p. 268. 



326 THE CHILD 

names and their characteristics of action and movement, 
evolved from the imagination of a Httle girl of four. The 
names : Rikka, junn, beeda, womp, jappa, melly, burkan, 
cattaby, pokiban, didd, booba, jinkatee, sleem, penna, modd, 
etc., look almost as if they might have been drawn from the 
animal names of some Siberian or Central Asiatic tribe. The 
explanation of the names and acts, however, would fail to find 
their fellows in the zoological mythology of any people outside 
of Bishop Hall's 'Mundus Alter et Idem,' or the Middle 
Ages. Some of them have not a little of the real child-touch. 
The melly that ' is so surprised and eats toffee ' ; the pokibans 
that ' eats almonds and jumps ' ; the ding that ' is so happy ' ; 
the burkan that ' is a nasty biting thing, and there is no more 
about it.' The ' atavism ' of Carroll and Lear is more common 
than generally admitted, not appearing in print as often as it 
occurs. 

The role of the imagination among many savage and bar- 
barous peoples is very great. Captain Spicer, a whaler, who 
mingled with the Eskimo, told Professor Mason that they often 
make invention a part of their sport. They go out to certain 
distant places, and, having imagined themselves in certain straits, 
they compare notes as to what each one woul d do. They actually 
make experiments, setting one another problems in arithmetic 
(411, p. 23). 

With this may be compared the question put by the 
culture-hero of the Micmacs, Gluskap, to the animals on 
the eve of man's creation : ' What would you do if you met 
a man?' and the familiar tests and interrogatories of our 
fairy-tales. 

How close the savage is here to the child may be seen 
from the 'I'll stump you to do — ,' ' let's play — ,' ' say something,' 
' do anything,' etc., of children's sports and games. Abundant 
material for comparative study might be found in the nith- 
songs of the Eskimo, the songs of the secret societies of the 
American Indians, the competitions in proverbs, verse-making, 
jesting, etc., of the lower classes of the people in all civilised 
communities, and the artificial sides of all of these as seen in the 
exercises of our schools at the present day. The varieties of the 
imagination among primitive peoples, racially and individually, 
are very great, probably quite as great as those noted among 
civilised children and adults by Queyrat, Burnham, Saint-Paul, 
and others who have studied the subject since Rivarol more 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 327 

than a century ago noted the fact that some men in medita- 
tion seemed to hear their thoughts from a voice within them, 
while others read them, language for these last being a picture 
(26, pp. 17, 32). 

A plea for the ' Hygienic Use of the Imagination ' has 
been made by Sir J. Crichton-Browne/ who points out the 
full significance of the fact that 'idiocy is just the opposite of 
phantasy.' The cultivation of the imagination has been very 
much neglected by men of science (physicians especially), 
although Faraday and Darwin, Akenside and Weir-Mitchell 
afford examples of its fertile employment. That the stimula- 
tion and cultivation of the imagination in children can be 
overdone is easily intelligible ; in fact, by seeking overmuch to 
cultivate the imagination one may give a death-blow to that 
naive yet genial appreciation which is the beauty of the child's 
liking for poetry, that wonderful imaginative work of man. 
One cannot fail to have something of this feeling in reading 
Mr Halleck's chapters on sensory training, especially those on 
'Special Sensory Training' (281, pp. 130-148), 'Cerebral De- 
velopment by the Formation, of Images' (281, pp. 149-170), 
where the author goes much further than his predecessors, 
Lecoq de Boisbaudran and Francis Galton, in the way of re- 
producing images. Such ' use of hterature to cultivate imaging 
power' is often almost atavistic in its efforts to decompose 
into visions, odours, smells, sounds and movements what 
Milton, Shakespeare and Tennyson please us with all at once. 
This art the genius is wise enough to use, the child near 
enough to the genius to feel. This anatomy of the imagination 
'must not be carried too far, or it becomes the veriest artificiality 
scorned by savage and child alike. 

Nature- Feelings. — It is an all too common idea that the 
' lower races ' of men, like children, have little or no apprecia- 
tion of the beauty and the majesty of Nature. Hoffding does not 
hesitate to declare that ' children and savages have, as a rule, 
no sense for the beauties of Nature' (298, p. 266), and Ribot 
tells us that 'in primitive poetry man is in the foreground. 
Nature is only an accessory. Little of description, a few 
verses of epithet, suffice to create it ' (536, p. 336). Psycholo- 
gists see fit to date the rise of real nature-feeling from the 
middle of the eighteenth century so far as the masses of the 
people are concerned, and to credit Rousseau with being about 
1 Brit. Med./oiirn., Aug. 1889. 



328 THE CHILD 

the first to arouse such a sentiment (536, p. 267). The ancient 
Greeks, however, and the Chinese had certainly a rather keen 
sense of natural grandeur and beauty, no less than had the 
Hebrews, while, as Biese, who has discussed the 'Develop- 
ment of the Feeling for Nature,' remarks, 'the nature-lyric is 
primitive and common to all peoples.' Concerning even 
RousseaUj ' the interpreter of Nature,' as he has been called, 
Professor Patten has remarked very recently (476, p. 455) : 
' Rousseau was a man of a more primitive type than the 
leaders of the preceding period of French thought. He had 
many of the characteristics of a savage, and his concept of 
Nature belonged to a much earlier epoch.' 

Of the Zuni Indians of New Mexico Mrs Stevenson tells us : 
' Our concepts of the universe are altogether different from 
those of primitive man ; we understand phenomena through 
philosophical laws, while he accounts for them by analogy ; we 
live in a world of reality, he in a world of mysticism and sym- 
bolism ; he is deeply impressed by his natural environment, 
every object with him possessing a spiritual life, so that celestial, 
bodies, mountains, rocks, the flora of the earth, and the earth ^ 
itself are to him quite different from what they are to us. The 
sturdy pine, delicate sapling, fragrant blossom, giant rock 
and tiny pebble play alike- their part in the mystic world of 
aboriginal man.' 

This is admirably exemplified in the Zufii creation-myths 
recorded by Mr Cushing, and the Polynesian legends pub- 
lished by Mr Gill. In these and other productions of the 
primitive imagination we find the glory of the seasons, the life 
of beast, bird, insect, the beauty of plant and flower, the noise 
of running waters, the music of the sea, the rosy dawn, the 
starlit night, etc. 

Of the Eskimo, Dr D. G. Brinton writes (73, p. 289), in 
his study of native American poetry : ' Some of their poetical 
productions reveal a true and deep appreciation of the 
marvellous, the impressive, and the beautiful scenes which 
their land and climate present. Prominent features in their 
tales and chants are the flashing, variegated aurora, whose 
shooting streams they fable to be the souls of departed 
heroes; the milky way, gleaming in the still Arctic night, 
which they regard as the bridge by which the souls of the 
good and brave mount to the place of joy ; the vast, glitter- 
ing, soundless snow-fields ; and the mighty crashing glacier, 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 329 

splintering from his shoreward diffs the ice-mountains which 
float down to the great ocean.' 

The 'Mountain-Chant' of the Navahos and the love- 
poems of the Micmacs and other eastern Algonkian Indians 
contain abundant evidence of sensibility to, and love of 
Nature, the former recalling at times Dante, in its majesty, 
the latter the love-lyrics of our own poets. In the creation- 
songs of the Dinkas of the White Nile and the amatory 
poems of the Hottentots a simplicity that is noble and 
convincing often appears. Everywhere we find, as Ratzel 
remarks (523, I. p. 49), that 'even the savage, the most 
prejudiced creature in human shape, the man with the least 
field of vision, receives an impression from the rainbow, " the 
bridge to the sky," from the roar of the sea, from the rustle of 
the woods, the bubbling of the spring.' With these im- 
pressions primitive superstition and primitive poetry work in 
such a way as to make it appear ' a highly superfluous ques- 
tion to ask if these races have a sense of Nature.' Says 
Dr Ratzel further (523, I. p. 70): 'Many myths are nothing 
but picturesque descriptions of natural events and personi- 
fications of natural forces. These bridge over the interval to 
science, for in them the mythology becomes, like science, the 
way and the method towards the knowledge of the causes of 
phenomena. The original object falls into the background, 
the images become independent figures whose quarrels and 
tricks have an interest of their own. Herewith we have the 
fable, especially the widespread beast-fable.' That some of 
the early Greek and Latin myths were of this character has 
been shown by Professor B. K. Emerson (190, p. 328), who 
has discussed such 'geological myths 'as 'the Chimaera ' (the 
poetry of petroleum), 'Niobe' (the tragic side of calcareous 
tufa), ' Lot's wife ' (the indirect religious effect of cliff-erosion), 
' Noah's flood ' (possibilities of the cyclone and earthquake 
wave working in harmony). The less imposing and perhaps 
more quietly poetic and imaginative side of the nature-love 
of primitive peoples is to be seen in the proverbs, legends 
and folk-speech of such Oriental peoples as the Tamuls of 
India. It is, therefore, not altogether just when Hoffding 
declares (298, p. 266) that, 'from the primitive practical 
standpoint a beautiful country is the same as a fruitful one, 
fruitful, that is, in corn and grass,' since not a few very 
primitive peoples are capable of, and do often express, a much 



330 THE CHILD 

higher sense of beauty than that. Similarly unfair is the state- 
ment of Ribot (536, p. 187), who ascribes the alleged lack 
of feeling for Nature in savages and children to poverty of 
mind: 'The child, who has a lively sense of the possession 
or the deprivation of a plaything, remains insensible before 
a great landscape by reason of his intellectual poverty. It is 
a fact (notwithstanding the common opinion to the contrary) 
that a savage, or a barbarian even, is not moved by the 
splendours of civilised life, but only by its mean {mesqiiin) and 
puerile sides. * Its grand aspects inspire in him neither desire, 
nor admiration, nor jealousy, for he does not comprehend 
them.' Among primitive peoples we not infrequently find 
individuals who enter into very close touch with Nature and 
with ' Nature's God,' and who would compare very favourably 
with the like characters belonging to our own race, or any 
other that has achieved or attempted civilisation. 

Writing of a Pawnee Indian priest, whose devotion to the 
religion of his fathers remained unshaken amid the new 
environment created by the whites, Miss Ahce C. Fletcher 
says : ^ ' His unquestioning faith in the religion of his fore- 
fathers soared far above the turbulent conditions of to-day, 
and gave to him a calm akin to the serenity of childhood, 
which was reflected in his kindly, smiHng, and peaceful 
face.' 

Mind-Conte7tt and Knowledge. — In connection with the 
numerous investigations of 'the contents of children's minds,' 
Heydner justly remarks that such analyses are often not more 
than half right, for, as is equally the case with primitive 
peoples, ' children can not be expected to tell their whole soul 
in the second school-year.' In all probability they know a 
great deal more about some one or some few things than they 
are given credit for, and think a great deal more about all of 
them than they are able to convey to their elders in intelligible 
form (295, p. 50). Not all the child learns and thinks in his 
walks through wood and mead, along river-bank and pond- 
margin, over hill and dale, through swamp and bog, in rainy 
and in pleasant weather, in summer sun and winter snow, 
comes to the surface when he is questioned for scientific pur- 
poses for a brief time and often under repressive or embarrass- 
ing circumstances. As httle does the teacher sometimes learn 
of the children's real, deep ideas and imaginings about heaven, 
1 Amer. Anthr., N.S., I. p. 85. 



/) 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 33 1 

horses, shadows, the wind, raihoads, Christmas, death, looking- 
glasses, moonshine, snails, canary-birds, etc., in the brief 
period of his inquisitorial office, as the new-come traveller is 
able to discover, in the few days of his residence among some 
savage or barbarous tribes, concerning their profoundest 
thoughts about man and nature. The childhood of the 
individual and the childhood of the race are pre-eminently 
periods of thought; concerning both we well might use the 
words of the poet and declare that even ' the body thought.' 

The extent of the knowledge of savage and barbarous 
tribes concerning the animal and vegetable world of their sur- 
roundings can be seen from the statement of Professor O. T. 
Mason (413, p. 79), that 'in every one of the eighteen 
environments [into which he divides North and South 
America] ' mentioned in this paper the savage people know the 
best thing for every purpose : the best substance for clothing, 
the best wood for the bow, for the spear, the arrow, etc. ; and 
it is astonishing to find what a large vocabulary exists in each 
one of them for different forms of animal life and different 
parts of the animal's body.' Professor Mason goes so far, 
indeed, as to declare that ' half the words of any primitive 
language are derived from man's association with beast- 
kind.' 

The Maoris of New Zealand, according to Dr Hector,^ 
' had a much better knowledge of the natural history of their 
country than any people he had ever heard of. The older 
Maoris had noticed and had distinct names for nearly all 
their plants, not merely those that were of use ; and the same 
names, with slight modifications, were universally in use 
throughout a country a thousand miles in length. They had 
generic names by which they grouped plants according to 
their affinities, in a way impossible to most people who were 
not educated botanists.' 

The mythology, both of the Navahos (to specify but one 
tribe of North American Indians) and of the Maoris, embodies 
much of this great knowledge of plant and animal environ- 
ment. 

In his discussion of ' Environmental Relations in Arizona,' 
M. Walter Hough ^ gives the following table to illustrate ' the 
thorough way [there are probably not over 160 indigenous 

'^Nature, Vol. XH. p. 467. 
^ Amer, Aiithr., May 1898. 



332 



THE CHILD 



species in the environment] in which the Hopi Indians have 
made use of their plant surroundings ' : — 



Employment of Plant and Tree. 



No. of Plants thi 
employed. 



soap, 



yeast 



Agriculture and forage (not cultivated) , 

Arts (dyeing, decorating, painting, cement, textiles 

etc.) .... 

Architecture (house-building) 
Domestic life (firewood, broon 

vessels, etc.) 
Games and amusements 
Dress and adornment . 
Folk-lore 

Food .... 
Medicine, folk and empirical 
Religion .... 



Total 



13 

17 

4 

10 
2 

6 
10 
47 
45 
19 

173 



Of the Micmac Indians of Nova Scotia, Dr Rand says, with 
some exaggeration (519, p. xi.) : 'They have studied botany 
from Nature's volume. They know the names of all the trees 
and shrubs and useful plants and roots in their country. They 
have studied their natures, habits and uses. They have killed, 
dissected and examined all the animals of North America, 
from the nestiige-pegajit to the gidwakchech (from the buffalo to 
the mouse). They have in like manner examined the birds 
and the fish.' 

The statement of Professor Freudenthal, of Breslau, there- 
fore, that 'primitive peoples, uneducated Europeans and 
children are able to distinguish but few species of flowers ' 
(220, p. 435), is an unjustifiable generahsation, in so far as 
' primitive people ' are concerned, as the evidence referred to 
above clearly indicates. 

The following table (all peoples do not count the same 
number of months; some of the lists are incomplete ; and many 
months have more than one name) will serve to demonstrate 
how the observations of the savage and barbarous races of men 
have been recorded in the names they have given to the various 
months, or divisions of the year, and at the same time to show 
the great influence of environment in determining them : — 



•i3dT3iq3.ns 1 ; N ; ^ ij^ ro \ 


■■edmiij 


': ': ^ » ':? ^ ; ; 


•pqom^ 


: ^'^ i : :: ^^ ■. 


•pnbiqo5tT33 


j CO j c» H^ ^ ': '-' 


'F^uazX 


; : : w r^ n : : 


•bAtjh 


M HH : HH : VO W On 


•B;oJiT3a 


^ rO CO 1 a^ ir^ : '■ 


••eSupuouo 


N : : : M o^ j \ 


•pdBU9-[ 


fO ; "-H M LO LT) 1-1 • 


•TjAvqifQ : : i-i : o ^ : ^ 


•33J3 


HH vo : HH : M « : 


. -JOOJJlOBia 




•At3U3;oo;s[ Jc^mm ju-j f'^i '-' 


•dBAvqsnqs 1 -, : c^ : ^d- c^ n \ 


•ui-isaaBH supQ 


vo ci 1-1 j ': vo j J 


•(J3UJT33) 9U9a 


: : "^ : : ^ : : 


•cpiuH 


M m M 1 ro M ; J 


Month-Names 
referring to 


Animals 

Birds . 

Fish . 

Reptiles, insects . 

Plants, f r u i t s 
(planting, harvest) 

Weather (sun, sky, 
cold, heat, light, 
etc.) . 

Human activities . 

Religion, festivals, 
etc. 



334 THE CHILD 

The detail of some of these observations may be judged 
from the fact that the Ojibwa have named three successive 
months from the growth of berries ; the Crees four months in 
succession (May-August) from the laying of eggs by birds, the 
little ones leaving the shell, the moulting of birds, and the 
fledglings taking to flight ; the Carrier Dene four successive 
months (July-October) from the appearance of the land-locked 
salmon, the red salmon, the little trout, and the whitefish. 
Moreover, the Hareskin Dene have, besides their months, a 
division of the year into sixteen 'seasons,' all of which are 
named after the conditions of day and night, heat and cold, 
rain and snow, the condition of the ground and the water. 
A similar table to that given above might be made for the 
names of the seasons, the cardinal points, etc. 

That the Indians as a class are ' incomparably superior to 
the average white man, or to the white man who has not made 
zoology or botany a subject of study,' is the opinion of Dr 
Washington Matthews,^ based on his own experience in the 
field. ' There is a prevalent impression,' says Dr Matthews, 
' that Indians are unable to generalise ; and a paragraph goes 
the round of the ethnological treatises to the effect that the 
Chatas [Choctaws] have no general term for oak-tree, but only 
specific names for the white oak, the black oak, the red oak, 
etc. This impression is entirely erroneous. The Indian is as 
good a generaliser and classifier as his Caucasian brother. 
His system of classification does not fully coincide with that 
of the white naturaUst, because his system of philosophy leads 
him to base his groups upon a different series of resemblances, 
but his arrangement is nevertheless the result of a process of 
generalisation.' Dependence upon the vegetable and animal 
w^orld for food necessarily gave the Indian extended know- 
ledge, made him an acute observer, and stimulated his faculties 
of interpretation and explanation. 

Abstraction. — Very minute knowledge, and the multiplicity 
of very special forms of observation, may sometimes lead to an 
impossibility of abstraction. The system which the natives of 
Madagascar, as Bastian tells us, employ to distinguish (with a 
different word for each) the twenty aspects of the growth of 
the horns of oxen, may be more perfect than their numeral 
system, since they feel in the form a more vivid interest, and 
it appeals to them more concretely. Not alone do savage 
1 Bull. Fhilos. Soc, Wash., VH. p. 74. 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 335 

races differ very widely in their powers of specialisation (sub- 
ject to the influence of milieu^ social status, etc.), but in the 
inferences they are capable of drawing from any given exhibi- 
tion or object presented, and children differ as widely in both 
ways. When von den Steinen showed a Bakairi Indian a 
looking-glass, the latter ' nodded calmly and said, " Water," ' 
and when other natives wished a sight of the mirror they said : 
'Show us the "water"!' Mr B. D. Howard, on the other 
hand, who showed a hand-mirror to the Ainu of the island of 
Saghahen, reports that ' This, to my astonishment, quickly 
produced exactly the effect my rifle failed to accomplish. As 
fast as I showed them their faces, they darted like arrows to 
the doorway, and nothing could induce them to come back.' ^ 
The difference between the actions of the two savages is easily 
understood; the Bakairi had called up in his mind by the 
sight of the mirror the water of the river, in which possibly he 
had often seen his own face reflected, and was in no way dis- 
turbed by the new object, while the Ainu thought he saw his 
own ghost or spirit, and was inexpressibly excited and filled 
with apprehension. It is evidently quite often not the fact of 
being a savage, but the range of possible associations, that 
determines the reaction at the sight of a mirror, a fact which 
apphes to children no less than to primitive peoples. 

When the Hottentots, who already possessed the word 
nadi^ ' mirror,' saw the Europeans read for the first time, they 
called a book 7iadi^ adding to it for purposes of clearness, 
ofheeta, 'for speaking' — a book was to them a 'speech-mirror.' 
On account of this new term the real mirror came to be desig- 
nated nadi ok'hangeela, or 'look-mirror.' This 'mirror of 
speech,' Spiegel der Rede ^ is adopted by Erdmann^ as a term 
worthy the consideration of modern linguistic psychology. 

That abstraction is more common both among the lower 
races of men and with children than is usually believed seems 
certain, the progress from the concrete to the abstract revealing 
itself in the development of language, art, religion, ethics, 
social institutions, etc. Preyer's child's ' new papa ' for ' uncle,' 
and the eleven-month-old boy's 'wawa' for 'dog, butterfly, 
trees, moving in the wind, thunder, etc.,' indicate some of the 
lines of thought traversed. Maennel fixes upon the sixth or the 
seventh year as the period in which ' first appear those abstrac- 

'^ Jottr. Anier. Folk- Lore, VH. p. 95. 
2 Arch.f. syst. Fhilos., N.F. HI. 32. 



336 THE CHILD 

tions which are comparable to general ideas.' There are great 
differences individually in children in their logical processes, 
and many grown-up people never reach anything like logical 
perfection ; the so-called ' apperception stages ' (Ziller and 
Rein make 8, Vogt 3, Hartmann 6, Lange 24) are difficult of 
deHmitation and interpretation, if, indeed, they exist at all in 
the fashion described by most writers of this school. In child- 
hood (as with savages generally) the first years of life (those 
passed before school-Ufe re-orients the child) are characterised, 
as Lange observes, by 'abstractions shaped by alternating 
sensual interests,' and a 'harmless naivete,'' which, later on, is 
replaced by the critical attitude. The child's first ' good ' is 
what is accompanied by pleasant consequences, and the 
sudden introduction of religious ideas at this period often does 
incalculable harm. 

' Only with the possession of language,' says Maennel, in 
his interesting study of 'Abstraction' (390, p. 37), 'does 
Nature lose her unity and break up into a multitude of centres, 
of beings, that are named, and, by names, furnished with indi- 
vidualities. Then, too, for the first time, abstraction — the 
simplest form, at least: — becomes possible. Still individuals 
cannot yet be conceived as altogether sharply delimited. For 
sleep-life and waking fife continue so to run over into each 
other, that the indeterminate forms of dreaming are still 
interpreted as real.' The child and the savage meet on this 
ground, some young boys and girls being as firmly impressed 
with the reahty of their dreams as are the Brazilian Indians of 
whom von den Steinen writes. The influence of this divided 
allegiance of primitive man to sleep and waking upon the 
development of speech has yet to be studied. Evidently there 
are other ' ghost-words ' than those pilloried by Skeat, the 
lexicographer. Maennel notes what he aptly terms ' the need- 
less abstraction of primitive peoples ' ; only something striking 
seems to be needed to lead to the formation of strange associ- 
ations bringing out ideas not longer possessed by civilised 
man. While we recognise the materially-minded character of 
savage and barbarous man (in which our children so often 
resemble him), we must not forget that 'primitive peoples far 
exceed our children, nay, even the adults of our civilised races, 
in the extraordinary keenness of their sense-perceptions, their 
wonderful attention, and their remarkable memory.' 

Mivart, who holds to the theory of ' a difference in kind 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 337 

between human reason and the cognitive faculties of brutes,' 
observes, with considerable truth : ' As folly or prejudice makes 
tales of animal intelligence so often quite untrustworthy, so 
also the statements as to the mental defects of savages are 
hardly less so' (429, p. 205). Thus many examples of 'what 
have been deemed forms of predication so low as to border on 
mere sensuous and animal language ' turn out, when carefully 
examined, as logical and as intellectual as expressions in daily 
use among users of the most highly developed languages of the 
civilised world. Even to-day the Englishman or American 
can and does use such an expression as, e.g., ' my work,' in 
such fashion, aided by emphasis, context and gesture, that it 
in no wise differs from the very primitive m ne of the Grebo, 
an African language said to mean either ' I do it,' or ' you do 
not.' So it is, when we come to the statement that many 
primitive languages lack general terms while they have a ple- 
thora of particular names. Our possession of these general 
terms may be, in many ways, and on diverse occasions, an 
economy of speech, yet there is something in what Mivart 
says (429, p. 205) : ' It has, for example, been objected against 
the intellectual ability of the Society Islanders that they have 
separate words for " dog's tail," " bird's tail," " sheep's tail," 
etc., but no word for "tail" itself — i.e., "tail in general." 
But really the experience of the use of that word by ourselves 
leads us to consider the condition of these islanders in this 
respect to be no great misfortune. We have our word " tail " 
— tail in general — and it is constantly made use of in a way 
which is hopelessly misleading. To use the same term, as we 
do, for what we call the " tails " of a peacock, a monkey, and 
a lobster is, so far, to be in a worse plight than that asserted of 
the Society Islanders.' The savage is, in a sense, ultra- 
scientific, if not economical of names. 

Conservatism and Misoneism, — The instinct of preservation 
in children has been discussed by Paola Lombroso. Children 
have 'an instinctive sense of preservation, as if they felt the 
fragility of their existence and clung to it with all their strength.' 
This is true physiologically and psychologically. Little 
children even have a lack of sensibility for pains, bruises, 
wounds, etc., that is often surprising, and their disregard of 
the consequences of a blow or a fall is, when they have not 
been pampered by too careful parents or nurses, at times most 
wonderful. Not localising pain very readily until two or three 

Y 



338 THE CHILD 

years of age, they seem to resemble the savages in their 
resistance to physical pain and their desperate clinging to 
life (370). All their psychic life is controlled by the feeling of 
self-preservation, the least expenditure of energy — the law of 
least effort really dominating everything. Their speech is of 
the sort that costs the least exercise of intelligence — gestures, 
cries, pointing of the finger, and after these onomatopoiic and 
imitative language. The bizarre associations of ideas in little 
children are often due, ' not to a power of generalisation, but 
rather to a repugnance to the effort of using new terms.' 
From economy of effort in conceptions it results also that all 
the child's ideas and images are concrete, it being much easier 
to seize the concrete than the abstract. Hence, also, he 
wishes questions to be 'clear, plain, without gaps, and well 
delimited'; he has a natural dislike for the vague, the in- 
definite, and takes long to acquaint himself with ideas of 
immortality, infinite space, etc. He is misoneistic and hates 
to have the old ways and old things changed or altered in any f, 
degree. He wants to hear the same story in the same words/^ 
from the same person, and is exceedingly jealous of even the 
slightest alteration in his favourite tale. This misoneism serves 
as a means of orientation and equilibration for the child, ' pre- 
venting him from wasting his strength in too many new 
experiences.' He develops ' a faculty for exploiting the 
pleasure to be had in life and avoiding much of its pain,' and 
would be loved rather than love, affection being often nothing 
more than a mimic extravagance, mere exuberance of joy. 
When thoroughly abandoned to his instincts, ' the child is a 
little savage, passionate, deceitful, megalomaniac, boastful, 
etc.,' but everywhere one finds evidence of the domination of 
this momentous instinct of preservation and conservatism. 

Language Cha?iges. — Useful for comparison with Miss 
Lombroso's study of the child is Mr Edmund Noble's essay on 
'The Principle of Economy in Evolution' (459), in which 
similar phenomena, as they present themselves in the history 
of the race, are discussed. Onomatopoeic names of animals, 
natural phenomena, implements, etc., animal and human 
noises and actions, illustrate the principle of economy in the 
expenditure of mental energy and intelligence in the child, 
while, in the adult, and in the evolution of the race, the 
departure from these principles of naming, the creation or 
adoption of all-inclusive, general terms, the emergence of 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 339 

generic terms in place of very special appellations, in other 
words, the economy of description made possible by the 
human intellect, which instead of describing a single quality of 
the object named, evolves or creates a word which calls up the 
image in its entirety, illustrate the workings of the human mind 
towards the same end, the production of a name-word with the 
least possible expenditure of mental effort. 

It is a great achievement in mental economy for the child 
to name the dog ' bow-wow,' or to signify its desire for water 
by making a gurghng sound, but even greater is the economy 
which the best educated speaker of the English language 
illustrates in his use of the words 'dog' and 'water.' This 
gain in generality of expression has of necessity entailed a great 
loss oi Sprachgefiihl {the sense of the etymological significance 
of names) and of the utilisation of analogy as a factor in name- 
giving. The ' mouse ' is no longer thought of as ' the stealer ' 
(white mice are now guests and pets) ; the ' duck ' is no longer 
perceived only as the 'waddler' ('duck' has even become a 
term of endearment) ; ' woman ' is no more known only as 
' the bearer ' (the ' maiden lady ' and the ' new woman ' have 
asserted themselves as a power in the land) ; the ' ant ' is 
no longer merely ' the swarmer ' (upon the nineteenth century 
it is his industry makes the greatest impression) ; the ' father ' 
is no longer simply the ' nourisher ' (modern politics abund- 
antly exhibit our ' city fathers ' as ' bleeders ' rather than as 
supporters and preservers) ; the ' star ' is no more merely ' the 
strewer ' (for the path of the theatrical ' star ' of to-day is more 
often ' strewn ' by the populace) ; a ' picture ' is now far 
from being a mere ' scratching ' (though it may be an ' etching ') 
etc. Had we to-day to name all the things we know by a 
single quality which we perceive them to possess, to the 
exclusion of all others, our language would be metamorphosed 
in strange and curious fashion, and would, by very reason of 
our advance in knowledge and perception of 7nilieu and 
environment, be in no way a return to the terms of our Anglo- 
Saxon forefathers, or the limited horizons of early childhood. 

Farther from the child, in some respects, and yet, as many 
of the words of his secret languages prove, nearer to him than 
to the savages, are we of to-day, with our word-sentences 
(' Mind ! ' ' Beware ! ' Thanks ! ' etc.), with the twists we give 
our slang expression ('Oh, I don't know!' 'Come off your 
perch ! ') and the contraction and syncopation we have visited 



340 THE CHILD 

upon the grammatical forms of our language (dropping of in- 
flections, simplification of verb form, abandonment of the 
subjunctive mood, use of auxiliary verbs, etc.). The gain 
which we have made in mental economy, as well as the 
difference between some forms of speech among primitive 
peoples and the language of the child is well illustrated by the 
following sentence which Mr Noble cites (459, p. 336) from 
Dr Bleek's specimens of the Zulu tongue : JJ-bu-kosi b-etu o-bii- 
kulu bu-ya-bona kala si-bu-tanda. The sentence means 'Our 
great kingdom appears ; we love it,' but a literal translation 
into English would run thus : ' The kingdom, our dom, which 
dom is the great dom, the do/n appears, we love the dom.^ 
Another example which shows how far we have left behind the 
complexities of savage speech, or, as some say, certain primitive 
peoples have departed from an original simplicity, is given by 
Major J. W. Powell in the course of his brief essay on the 
' Evolution of Language ' (506). A Ponka Indian in saying ' a 
man killed a rabbit ' really discourses thus: 'The man, he, 
one, animate, standing [in the nominative case], purposely 
killed, by shooting an arrow, the, rabbit, he, the, one, animate, 
sitting ' [in the objective case]. 

Another detail in process of disappearance is the subjunc- 
tive mood, last relic of the vast labyrinth of verbal forms of 
mood, produced by alteration of the verb-stem itself. A recent 
investigation reveals the fact that among some 900,000 words, 
used by nine eminent writers of to-day (Hardy, James, Dowden, 
Lang, Lecky, Meredith, Trail, Morley, Stevenson), the sub- 
junctive of any other verb but be occurs only fifteen times. A 
like tendency, although by no means so strongly, characterises 
most of the Romance languages, as Mr H. L. Thomas ^ 
has pointed out, and was even noticeable in some of the 
Latin writers of the Augustan era, to say nothing of Plautus 
and Terence. Both in Latin and in Romance texts the 
editors 'have made the old writers not infrequently conform 
to usage, practically obsolete in their own day. The Romance 
tongues have a vast accumulation of such impedwienta still, 
for, as Herrainz remarks (294, p. 239), Spanish 'has 850 
irregular verbs, with 15,540 anomalous forms or words.' 

Idea of Time; the Present. — 'The idea of Time,' 
says Hoffding (298, p. 184), 'is hardly to be traced 
in children before the third year,' and Guyau observes 
•^ Trans. Anthr. Soc, Wash., I, p. 29. 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 34I 

(259a, p. 147), 'the child distinguishes clearly neither 
times, nor places, nor persons,' and, like the animal, 'has not 
really a past.' Erasmus Darwin ^ had already said 'the ideas 
of brutes, like those of children, are almost perpetually pro- 
duced by their present pleasures, or their present pains,' and 
Mme. Necker (455, I. p. 194) had noted the ' peculiarity of the 
child's imagination,' that it is ' occupied only with the present 
time.' Even the 'once upon a time' in older children is 
made present and tlie child feels the story as ' now.' The 
absence of tense-signs in many primitive languages may be 
compared with the verbs that serve for all tenses in the early 
development of child-speech. As Brinton (73, p. 404) says : 
' Equally foreign to primitive speech was any expression of 
time in connection with verbal forms ; in other words, there 
was no such thing as tenses.' Thoreau tells us (638, p. no) : 
,,' I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that ' for 
^ yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow they have only one word, and 
they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for 
yesterday, forward for to-morrow, and overhead for the passing 
day.' There is some exaggeration here, however, for, as 
Ribot observes (536, p. 259) : 'The human race has acquired 
very quickly prevision and care for the morrow, even without 
passing out of [the stage of] savage life, hunting and fishing.' 
Besides 'the instinct of accumulation and preservation mani- 
fests itself in all its simplicity with the majority of animals and 
the most savage peoples, who live strictly from hand to mouth.' 
Memory. — The forgetfulness and short memory of primitive 
man and of the child have been cited by more than one writer 
as affording a notable parallelism. Upon this point Steinmetz 
remarks : ' I believe that, generally, the memory of savage man 
is very short, but with considerable range of variation. It is 
more often termed short by observers when personal incidents 
and historical events are concerned, but, on the other hand, 
we cannot forget primitive man's surprising knowledge of the 
plants and animals which interest him, their qualities and 
habits — a faculty so often and so highly praised^ — as well as his 
astonishing knowledge of place, his wonderfully good memory 
for details of paths and localities, drinking-places and feeding- 
grounds of animals, all of which have been emphasised again 
and again. We must conclude, therefore, that the memory of 
primitive man is not at all short for all those things necessary 
^ Zoonomia, Vol. I. p. 265. 



342 THE CHILD 

to him, or with which he daily comes into contact in the 
struggle for existence, for all things, which, for any reason, 
arouse his interest' (613, 1, p. 313). Special and particular cir- 
cumstances exercise and lengthen the memory of primitive man 
to a considerable extent. 

Mr G. R. Stetson, who investigated the memory ability of 
500 white (average age 1 1 years) and 500 black (average age 12.57 
years) children in the public schools of Washington, D.C. — the 
test was the repetition of a brief poem after reciting it (verse 
by verse) in concert twice — found that the negro children 
had 18 per cent, better memory-retention. And while there 
seemed to exist a general correspondence between memory- 
averages and scholarship, the memory-rank of the negro chil- 
dren was higher than their study-rank more conspicuously than 
was the case with the white children, although the negro 
children generally were inferior with regard to intellect. 
Dr F. W. Colegrove, in his study of ' Individual Memories,' 
has some interesting details as to the difference between the 
memory-recollection of whites, negroes and Indians, the roles 
of racial experience and environment being very noticeable. 
One very curious fact is thus recorded : ' One could hardly 
find an Indian or white child afraid of a candy sheep's head 
because the teeth showed, but this was the earliest memory of 
a negress ' (117, p. 240). 

Historic Sense. — The historic sense among children and 
primitive peoples has been studied by Mrs Mary S. Barnes 
from the data of ethnology, and the examination, by the story- 
method, of some 1250 Californian school children, between the 
ages of eight and sixteen. These children were given ' a story 
without a date, a place, a name, or a moral,' and the questions 
spontaneously asked by them were taken as evidence of ' the 
comparative curiosity of children as to personalities, time, 
cause and effect, and truth.' The chief results of Mrs Barrjes's 
investigations (36, p. 89) may be thus summarised: i. With 
children (from seven years of age onward) all the elements of 
history (time, cause and effect, social, unit, truthful record) lie 
within the field of their curiosity, and the origin-questions (' Who 
made us ? ' ' Where did we come from ? ' etc.) are very early in 
their appearance. So ' among savages they appear altogether 
in the rudimentary forms of the myths of origin, which, un- 
placed in space, vaguely placed in time, attempt to give some 
true account of the beginnings of man and of the world ' ; and, 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 343 

moreover, they ' progress together, none of them missing, now 
this one, now that one leading.' 2. The sense of time, with 
savages, ' based upon the power to count, and the power to 
record that count concretely, either with the fingers, the 
notched stick, or the knotted cord, develops along with the 
development of the inventions for keeping count; in other 
words, this sense requires much objective assistance.' In 
children 'this sense is slight,' and 'time is badly understood 
until the age of twelve or thirteen ' — facts which seem to justify 
the conclusion that ' the child should be assisted, as the savage 
was, by some concrete symbol or invention [chart or net of 
centuries], by which he can keep his counts in sight, and 
reckon time visibly,' as he does space on a map. 3. Both with 
savages and children 'the notion of cause and effect, or, to 
put it differently, the power to infer, is present from the begin- 
ning, but with primitive people it is unconscious, and with 
children the power does not at all become critical before the 
age of twelve or thirteen, seeming then to receive a positive 
impulse, becoming stronger as well as more exact ' — facts which 
permit us to conclude that ' children should not be especially 
trained or urged in inference until the ages of twelve or thirteen, 
and that then we may reasonably encourage them to draw in- 
dependent and correct conclusions from given premises.' 4. 
With both primitive peoples and children 'the sense of the 
social unit concentrates itself about ancestors, heroes, kings, 
developing into a sense of wider personality, as their history, 
that is, their experience, widens,' but with the latter the 'larger 
interest ' cannot be said to develop before the ages of eleven 
or twelve. Here the conclusion is that ' history should first 
interest itself with the biographies of heroic and striking char- 
acters who are connected with the previous knowledge or life 
of the child [with the myths he already knows, with the 
country] and always with that life of action [fighting, hunting, 
building] which belongs to children and primitive people alike.' 
For children this sort of ' instruction may take the place of war 
and trade in widening their narrow world.' 5. Savages have a 
' quite positive sense of a truthful record,' seek ' to preserve the 
original record or reUc by every means in their power,' although 
' it does not occur to them to substantiate that truth by any 
searching criticism of evidence,' while children 'are very 
anxious to know whether a record or story is true or not, and 
show interest in an original record or relic,' although they seem 



344 THE CHILD 

to be ' largely contented with being told that it is true by a 
person in whom they have faith, not showing a tendency to 
inquire critically into the matter until the ages of twelve or 
thirteen.' Here we may argue in favour of ' connecting history 
from the beginning with original records, scenes and objects,' 
by which means the children will be afforded ' that material tie 
with the past which they desire as much as the savages/ 6. 
With the race * critical history develops last, being preceded 
by beautiful history, moral history, and mnemonic history, all 
these forms running along contemporaneously,' while with 
children ' history finds natural expression in stories, pictures, 
dramatic plays and poems, with or without a moral.' The 
conclusion here is that 'we should seek our history for children 
in Plutarch, Homer and Shakespeare, before seeking it in 
edited documents with notes and criticisms of the modern 
school of history,' and we must let the scientific forms of 
history ' wait on the development of material, and also on the 
development of the critical sense; that is, until the ages of 
twelve and above.' The prominence of lists and genealogies 
in primitive history seems to justify to some extent ' some form 
of chart or list or century calendar which can constantly be 
used, as a map would be, for matters of time,' while 'the wide 
employment of aesthetic and didactic forms of history indicates 
that they should form a large element in the early presentation 
of our subject.' 7. Among primitive peoples 'the instant 
widening of interest and curiosity, when brought into contact 
with new objects and people,' and with children 'the instant 
awakening of interest at the sight of a strange relic or picture ' 
are facts which serve to ' indicate that we may widen the field 
of history as fast as new experience or knowledge can widen it.' 
8. The sex-difference among children — boys appear more 
curious in regard to who, where, how, girls as to why ; boys are 
superior in inference ; time, truth and general detail seem to 
show no sex-difference — ' are not pronounced enough to warrant 
a separation of boys and girls,' while the probability is that 'no 
artificial method of stimulating these powers will equal the 
natural rivalries of the school-room and the sexes.' 

Curiosity. — 'A curious child' is a famifiar figure with the 
poets, and Guyau rightfully says : ' The child is naturally 
curious,' repeating what Fenelon had already written in 1678, 
' the curiosity of children is a natural penchant that precedes 
instruction,' and what Plutarch had written before Fenelon : 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 345 

/'Children are much in love with riddles and such fooleries as 
are difficult and intricate ; for whatever is curious and subtle 
doth attract and allure human nature as antecedently to all 
instruction agreeable and proper to it.' ^ 

Says Ribot (536, p. 60) : ' I'his primitive necessity — the 
need to know — is, in its instinctive form, curiosity. It has all 
degrees, from the animal that feels and scents to a Goethe who 
searches everything, wishes to know, to embrace everything ; from 
puerile investigation to the highest ; but whatever differences 
there may be in its object, in point of application, in its in- 
tensity, it always remains identical with itself. He who is 
without it, as the idiot, is a eunuch in the intellectual order.' 
In all probability, the child is more given to curiosity than 
primitive man ; there is some truth in Spencer's dictum that 
the savage has little taste for novelty. 

Story-telling. — Between the story-telling of the child and 
that of primitive man resemblances might justly be expected, 
although many of the tales and legends of even the lowest 
races of men possess so many peculiarities due to adult ex- 
perience that the comparison cannot always be made upon 
similar terms. Moreover, the alleged ' childishness ' of many 
of the tales of savages is born of the inability or disinclination 
of the occasional visitant or prejudiced resident among savage 
peoples to thoroughly seize and comprehend their ways and 
means of expression. Very often these are rather ' child-like ' 
than 'childish.' 

From the collation of fifty-six children's stories (thirty-two by 
boys, twenty-four by girls) — ' the stories were told, not written, by 
the children at school, they being allowed perfect freedom in 
telling anything they wished, the stories not being criticised in 
any way ' — Miss Clara Vostrovsky, of the experimental school 
connected with Stanford University, California, thus sums up the 
differences between the child's story as told by himself and the 
same story told for him by an adult : ' In the child's story no 
sentiment is expressed ; nor are his own feeHngs referred to in 
any way. There is little of the esthetic; no description of 
dress or persons [the story was of a little garden party] ; and 
not general, but definite, names are used by him. On the 
whole, the child gives facts, and lets fife itself speak for him. 
He has not yet learned that one can be in active pleasant 
circumstances and not be happy. With him certain facts or 
1 Morals, HI. p. 315. 



34^ THE CHILD 

conditions produce certain inevitable reactions, and to mention 
these reactions seems to him an utter waste of words. Be- 
sides he has not yet reached the unfortunate stage of thinking 
of them ' (671, p. 16). Not a few of the characteristics here 
mentioned belong also to the earliest forms of story-telling in 
the race, and the resemblance is, naturally enough, all the 
closer when the oral, not written tale of the child is compared 
with the unwritten stories of the savage. The omission of the 
apparent and the inevitable is often marked in the myths of 
savage and barbarous peoples, and the absence of such to us 
(who seek to interpret them) very necessary links has often led 
to great misunderstanding. 

It further appears that actions and names fill a very large 
place in the child's mind — feeling, sentiment, aesthetic details, 
moral distinctions, etc., playing quite an insignificant role. 
Moreover, ' no great difference is shown in the chart between 
boys and girls, although boys seem to care a little more for 
action, while girls care decidedly more for what is said.' 

The general run of the subjects dealt with can be seen 
from the following table : — 



Stories about the child himself or [ About every - day subjects and 
about other children . . 40 things of common occurrence 

About older persons . 
About other subjects . 
True stories 



Imaginary 



I with the child . . .11 
15 , Unusual events, trips, parties, 
49 I etc 45 



7 



Mental and Emotional Characters of Primitive Peoples. — 
Concerning the Cucamas Indians, a Tupi tribe of the Upper 
Amazons, in Peru, Mr H. W. Bates observes (42, p. 259) : ' The 
goodness of these Indians, Hke that of most others amongst 
whom I Hved, consisted perhaps more in the active bad qualities 
than in the possession of good ones ; in other words, it was 
negative rather than positive. Their phlegmatic, apathetic 
temperament, coldness of desire, and deadness of feeling, want 
of curiosity and slowness of intellect, make the Amazonian 
Indians very uninteresting companions anywhere.' Not only 
is 'their want of curiosity extreme' (though a dash of wit 
appears here and there), but ' their imagination is of a dull, 
gloomy quality,' and they also ' seem never to be stirred by 
the emotions — love, pity, admiration, fear, wonder, joy, en- 
thusiasm.' These, according to Mr Bates, are ' characteristics 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 347 

of the whole race,' and the good fellowship of these Indians 
' seems to arise, not from warm sympathy, but simply from the 
absence of eager selfishness in small matters.' 
^. Dr Franz Boas (60, p. 21), who, by scientific training and 
long personal experience with the aborigines of North 
America, is well qualified to speak upon such matters, tells us 
how ' the descriptions of the state of mind of primitive people, 
such as are given by most travellers, are too superficial to be 
used for psychological investigation,' and how little there really 
is in the statement that certain mental qualities are ' racial 
characteristics of the lower groups of mankind.' The evidence 
is very fallible ; the traveller is a prejudiced witness from the 
beginning ; the missionary has his mind strongly set against 
the religious ideas and customs of the savage ; the trader is 
without interest in their beliefs, their arts and their institutions ; 
the Greek scholar looks on their language as a senseless 
jargon ; while few men, and still fewer women, have resided 
among primitive peoples long enough and entered into their 
whole life sympathetically enough to be much more than 
'observers of disconnected actions, the incentive of which 
remains unknown.' 

Fickleness. — The fickleness of primitive man figures in the 
modern text-books of psychology as one of his most fundamental 
traits, but, as Dr Boas remarks, ' the proper way to compare 
the fickleness of the savage and that of the white is to com- 
pare their behaviour in undertakings which are equally im- 
portant to each,' and 'the alleged fickleness may always be 
explained by a difference of the valuation of motives, and is not 
a specific characteristic of primitive man.' The white man's 
' fuming and raging ' over loss of time, and lack of interest on 
the part of his native companions or employees, must appear 
to them strange, who have no such conception of the value of 
time and no such interest in the particular subject as he. 
That primitive man has perseverance, however, and in a high 
degree, is abundantly shown by the time and care he takes with 
his weapons, utensils and art products, the privations and 
hardships he undergoes to satisfy his ambition, and the 
fasting and other strenuous ceremonials to which he submits 
as a preliminary to taking his place among the men and 
warriors of his tribe. Primitive man is fickle where all human 
beings are fickle, but not specially so. 

Passion. — Another thing said to mark primitive man as 



348 THE CHILD 

such is 'outbursts of passion occasioned by slight provocation.' 
Here again, as Dr Boas points out, the social status of the 
white and the savage is so different, that if perseverance 
and control of passion seem less common with savage and 
barbarous peoples, 'the cause must be looked for not in the 
inherent abiUty to produce them, but in the social status which 
does not demand them to the same extent.' The manifold 
and complicated customs, restrictions, taboos, etc., concerning 
marriage and the sex-relations, religion, food supply, and the 
like, are sufficient evidence that, with primitive man, ' his 
passions are just as much controlled as ours, only in different 
directions.' The irrelevancy of the question of the rights of 
slaves, which caused the outburst of ' the noble passion which 
preceded and accompanied the War of the Rebellion,' would, 
Dr Boas assures us, with not a few primitive peoples, rank the 
great struggle of the North and South, in its highest aspects, 
an unjustifiable outburst of passion. Here, also, the difference 
between primitive and civilised man has been exaggerated by 
ignoring the common human characteristics and the special 
circumstances evoking them. 

Lack of Coticentration. — No trait of primitive man, how- 
ever, according to the school of Spencer and the book- 
psychologists, is more characteristic than ' his inability of con- 
centration when any demand is made upon the more complex 
faculties of his intellect.' Fortunately we have concerning this 
point the evidence of two witnesses, between whom it is not 
hard to decide. G. M. Sproat, who visited the natives of the 
west coast of Vancouver Island in i860, says of them : 'The 
native mind, to an educated man, seems generally to be 
asleep. ... On his attention being fully aroused, he 
often shows much quickness in reply and ingenuity in argu- 
ment. But a short conversation wearies him, particularly if 
questions are asked that require efforts of thought or memory 
on his part. The mind of the savage then appears to rock to 
and fro out of mere weakness.' Concerning this passage, 
which Spencer and other writers have quoted approvingly, Dr 
Boas himself declares : ' I happen to know the tribes mentioned 
by Sproat through personal contact. The questions put by 
the traveller seem most trifling to the Indian, and he naturally 
soon tires of a conversation carried on in a foreign language 
and one in which he finds nothing to interest him. I can 
assure you that the iiiterest of those natives can easily be raised 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 349 

to a high pitch, and that I have often been the one who was 
wearied out first.' This will be corroborated by anyone who 
has really entered into the life of primitive man — his art, his 
religion, his folk-lore. Moreover, ' the intricate system of 
exchange,' ' the systematic distribution (planned without 
mnemonic aids) of property in such a manner as to increase 
their wealth and social position,' to say nothing of the other 
characteristic activities of these Indians, afford ample proof of 
their mental awakeness, and 'require great foresight and con- 
stant application.' Careful studies of other primitive peoples 
would doubtless result in similar discoveries. 

Orighiality. — Again, it is far too customary to stigmatise 
primitive man as altogether ' hide-bound,' ultra-conservative, 
and especially as ' lacking originality,' and never being 
willing or able to 'deviate from the traditional customs and 
beliefs.' Although custom is, naturally, stronger, where it 
is more useful and necessary in social life, among primitive 
peoples, they cannot justly be charged with a complete lack of 
originality. Dr Boas cites as proving the existence of a 
considerable fund of originaHty among the lower races of men 
'the great frequency of the appearance of prophets among 
newly-converted tribes, as well as among pagan tribes,' the 
frequent introduction of ' new dogmas by individuals,' the 
numerous changes in myths and beliefs ' accomplished by the 
independent thought of individuals,' and holds that ' the 
mental altitude of individuals who thus develop the beliefs of a 
tribe is exactly that of the modern philosopher,' for even with 
us Hhe mind of even the greatest genius is influenced by the 
current thought of his time.' 

Interesting data upon this topic are to be found in the 
elaborate study of the ' Ghost-dance ' religion of the Indians 
of the Western and North-western United States, recently made 
by Mr James Mooney, who remarks : ' Briefly and broadly it 
may be stated that the more primitive a people the more 
original their thought. Indian prophets are usually original 
as to their main doctrine, but are quick to borrow anything 
that may serve to make it more impressive.' 

If the savage is to be compared with the child, it cannot be 
along the lines of unlimited fickleness, outbursts of passion 
with but shght cause, lack of power of mental concentration, 
weak interest, mental inertness, lack of originality, etc., but the 
comparison must take place along the lines of development 



350 THE CHILD 

of these and other characteristics in the special circumstances 
under which they arise and evolve. The savage may be a 
child, it is true, but he is a very human child, and 'father 
of the man,' here as elsewhere. General impulsiveness is, in 
fact, too vague and general an accusation, and one which fails 
in so many specific cases that one may reasonably doubt 
the existence of specific differences in this regard between 
the * lower ' and ' higher ' races of man, apart from social and 
environmental stimuli. 

l7nprovide?ice. — Improvidence is often said to be character- 
istic alike of the savage and the child, and Herbert Spencer 
and other writers have attributed this ' mark of primitive man ' 
to his general impulsiveness. But Dr Boas, who knows the 
savage well, tells us (60, p. 22): 'I believe it would be more 
proper to say, instead of improvidence, optimism. " Why 
should I not be as successful to-morrow as I was to-day ? " 
is the guiding thought of primitive man. This thought is, 
I think, not less powerful in civilised man. What builds up 
business activity but the belief in the stability of existing 
conditions?' There is then 'a difference in the degree of 
improvidence caused by the difference of social status,' but 
there is in this respect no ' specific difference between lower 
and higher types of man.' The true savage is optimistic as the 
real child is, and the genius who ' takes no thought for 
the morrow.' In a sense, all believe in the immortality 
of conditions and opportunities as well as in that of individuals 
or entities. For them the world is one long to-day. As the 
Httle Italian girl said when promised something to-morrow : 
'To-day is already to-morrow ' (369, p. 188). Mr Hartland 
tells us that the fairy-tales in which the hero 'detained in 
Fairyland is unconscious of the flight of time ' are really 
'characteristic of a high rather than a low stage of civilisation.' 
(286, p. 254). The Dumagas of the Philippines, so Dr 
Brinton informs us,i when the missionaries tried to persuade 
them to settle down and adopt sedentary habits, made 
answer 'that their religion forbade them to take thought 
for the morrow, but to trust wholly in their gods to provide.' 
The sacred scriptures of the Semitic populations of Western. 
Asia are not more optimistic than this. It can only be 
compared with the optimism of the child. 

Savage ajtd Civilised. — Professor O. T. Mason, in his paper 

^ Amer. Anthr.^ XI. p. 301. 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 35 I 

on 'The Savage Mind in the Presence of CiviUsation ' (414, 
p. 45), insists that ' the only valuable education to a lower race 
is that which enables the subjects to develop their highest 
energies and intelligence among those where their lives are to 
be passed. ; In its true and widest sense education is not 
confined to school instruction [highly stimulated savages, who 
are merely schooled, either perish miserably or become lazaroni 
among their own people, or the dominant race]. It embraces 
all that changes in the presence of higher culture.' Moreover, 
' functions [which vary more easily than structure] may change 
many times in the life of an individual, but the edifice of 
the body politic, the family, and the church, can be recon- 
structed only with the greatest wisdom and patience.' Contact 
with good, honest, just and law-abiding whites will do more to 
reform the dress, the habits, and, where necessary or possible, 
the beliefs and institutions of the Indians, than the ' education ' 
of a few, who find themselves in large part unable to keep from 
relapsing into the ways of their kinsmen or abandoning them- 
selves to the vice and crime of the whites. Sudden sub- 
stitution is hardly ever quite safe ; gradual transformation is 
nearly always infinitely better. It is absolutely necessary to 
pay attention to the graduations, ' stages of culture,' and social 
evolutions which are known to have taken place in the history 
of the innumerable tribes of man. ' There are certain lines or 
categories of culture,' says Professor Mason, 'such as food, 
dress, shelter, war, industry, ornament, gratification, traffic, 
family organisation, government and religion, along which 
there has been evolution and elaboration,' and among these 
categories 'there is gradation, nearly in the order named.' 
Since it is ' more difficult for a people to change in the higher 
and more intellectual than in the lower categories,' it will 
generally be found ' easier to induce a people to change food, 
dress, implements, weapons, etc.,' than to alter their language, 
kinship, government and religion.' 

Here again a comparison may be made with the develop- 
ment of child-life, a comparison which brings out what is really 
best in the child and in the savage. 

Karl von den Steinen, whose intimate knowledge of the 
primitive peoples of Central Brazil endues his words with 
great significance, observes : ' Savagery, as it really is, finds 
still deep lodgment in our brains and hearts, and seems to us 
in many ways an honourable and estimable possession. The 



352 THE CHILD 

culture of primitive peoples is, on the average, much higher, 
ours much lower, than generally appraised.' 

So also Dr Donath, who lays great stress upon the evidence 
just cited : ' However low, mentally, the stage of primitive man 
may be, it is, after all, mostly conditioned by external circum- 
stances, especially by lack of exercise. The brain organisation 
of primitive man, I believe, allows him a capacity for mental 
development, which is hardly less than that of the averagely 
endowed European' (171, p. 46). 

The best recent studies of language, sociology, psychology 
(numeration, colour-sense, association of ideas, mind-content, 
senses and will) seem to support this view. 

Racial and Lidividiial Development. — Dr Franz Boas (60, 
p. 7), in endeavouring to answer the question why the ancient 
inhabitants of Europe were 'able so easily to assimilate the 
culture offered them,' where at the present time ' primitive 
people dwindle away and become degraded before the approach 
of civilisation, instead of being elevated by it,' a question 
which has often been answered by assuming 'a higher 
organisation of the inhabitants of Europe,' enumerates the 
following interesting points of difference between the contact of 
culture and barbarism now and then : i./The primitive people 
of ancient times were alike in appearance with the civilised 
man of their day, and ' it was possible that, in the colonies of 
ancient times, society could grow by accretion from among the 
more primitive people. 2. The 'permanent contiguity of the 
people of the Old World, who were always in contact with each 
other, and therefore subject to the same influences,' did not 
permit 'the devastating influences of diseases [^, the epidemics 
following the advent of the whites into America and Poly- 
nesia], which nowadays begin to ravage the inhabitants of 
territories newly opened to the whites,' to play so great a role 
in the past as now. 3. The contrast between the culture 
represented by the modern white and that of primitive man 
'is far more fundamental than that between the ancients 
and the people with whom they came into contact ; ' to-day, e.g.^ 
modern methods of manufacture exterminate the industries of 
primitive peoples, whereas, in olden times, the rivalry was 
between two hand-products only. 4. In not a few parts of the 
world, e.g., America and portions of Siberia, ' the primitive 
tribes are swamped by the numbers of the immigrating race,' 
which ' crowds them so rapidly out of their own haunts that 



THE CHILD AND THE SAVAGE 353 

no time for gradual assimilation is given ' — a state of affairs 
hardly known in ancient times. 

The more favourable* conditions for assimilation of the 
primitive tribes, and not the higher gifts of the civilised, seem, 
so far as the story of European civilisations is concerned, to 
have been a most potent factor in their preservation and 
advancement in culture. 

An interesting parallel might be made here between the 
treatment of children by adults in the way of supervision 
and education and the modern impact of civilisation upon 
primitive man. If there actually have been more geniuses 
in proportion to the population in ancient times and in certain 
quarters of the globe, the facts noted by Dr Boas might, 
in part, account for it. 

To-day, adults emphasise too much the individual 
differences, instead of the genial likenesses of all children, 
rendering difficult the proper growth of the general social 
virtues and the fundamental traits of genius ; lack of ' co- 
education ' at the right epoch, the absence of the real mother 
so often among the teaching profession, and of the best 
atmosphere of family-life in the school — education being so 
often bachelor-ridden and old-maid-ridden — tend in the same 
direction. The school-boy is so often an entirely different 
animal from the home-boy that diseases of various sorts 
find much easier lodgment with the one than with the other, 
j Adults emphasise too much the gap between the wisdom of 
■•J childhood and their own knowledge, and exterminate the 
genius of the young by the school-machinery of their own 
invention.'', Often, too, the child is literally swamped by the 
mass of adults about him, who do not give him time at all 
to grow naturally and in his own best fashion. 




THE 'bear mother.' 

Slate Carving of Haida Indians, representing the agony of the mother in suckling her 
child, half-human, half-animal (from Rep. U.S. ISat. Mvs., 1888). 



CHAPTER IX 

THE CHILD AND THE CRIMINAL 

Lombroso ajid Crimi?ial Anthropology. — In 1876 Professor 
Cesare Lombroso, of Turin, published, under the title Uomo 
Delinquente (363), the first volume of a book which may be 
said to have created the so-called ' Italian School ' of criminal 
anthropologists. The literature on the subject since that time 
has assumed huge proportions, the theses of the Italian 
psychiatrist having been debated pro and con in almost 
every language of Europe, the books treating of the subject 
now numbering hundreds, the pamphlets, minor essays and 
articles counting up their thousands. The gist of the dis- 
cussions may be read in the article of Dr Robert Fletcher 
(216) and the volume on The Criminal (184), by Havelock 
Ellis, while some of the more recent data are treated of in 
Ferriani (202). The chief points of Lombroso's theories, for 
our present interest, lie in the approximations which he sought 
to establish between the criminal, the savage and the child. 

From extended and repeated observations of the anomalies, 
abnormalities, defects and imperfections of the body, its mem- 
bers and organs, anatomically, physiologically and psycho- 
logically considered, Lombroso came to the conclusion that 
the criminal was physically atavistic, inheriting forms and 
pecuharities from both ancient historic and prehistoric man. 
From similar data he also sought to make out analogies 
between the criminal and the lunatic, epileptic and other 
degenerate classes of humanity. This association of the 
criminal with the savage and the lunatic had also been made 
some five or six years before the appearance of Lombroso's 
book by Dr Bruce Thomson, of Perth, Scotland, in an article 
on ' The Hereditary Nature of Crime,' ^ where he notes the 
difficulty of determining 'where badness ends and madness 
^ Jottni, Ment. Set., Jan. 1870, 
355 



356 THE CHILD 

begins in criminals,' and remarks, concerning the criminal 
class, who have their locale and community in the large cities, 
' they degenerate into a set of demi-civilised savages, who in 
hordes prey upon society ' ; these, he says, are ' born into 
crime, as well as reared, nurtured and instructed in it, and 
habit becomes a new force, a second nature, superinduced 
upon their original moral depravity ' ; and ' from such physical 
we naturally expect low psychical characteristics'; we get 
thus a criminal type. Beside the atavistic argument Lom- 
broso put forward another based upon the phenomena of 
childhood. Gathering together from Moreau, Bain, Perez 
and others, observations and statements concerning the male- 
volent and maleficent instincts and impulses of children, their 
egoism, cruelty, etc., he made the generalisation that 'the 
germs of moral insanity and crime occur in normal fashion 
during the first years of man's life, just as in the embryo we 
are constantly meeting with forms which, in the adult, are 
monstrosities.' : Both the atavistic argument and the argument 
from childhood he combined in the declaration that the 
criminal, himself recalling the savage and prehistoric man, 
can be seen, on a reduced scale, in the child, while the 
criminal, subject to an arrest which has prevented the trans- 
formation of these tendencies of early life, may be looked 
upon as ' a sort of incomplete product, which retains in adult 
life the ordinary normal attributes of childhood' (143, 
pp. 59-61). 

Criticisms of Lofnbroso's Theory. — Among those who criti- 
cised the Lombrosan view of a rapprochement between the 
child and the criminal were, in the earlier stages of the dis- 
cussion, Magnan, Tarde, Benedikt, Dortel, Fere, etc. Magnan 
(143, p. 61) maintained that children who seemed to present, 
in a sort of embryonal fashion, the criminal type were ' not 
normal but degenerate'; Dortel (143, p. 61) held that 'while 
the criminal had certain peculiarities of the child, the child, on 
the other hand, had nothing of the criminal about him ' ; Tarde 
(143, p. 61) argued against the existence of 'a childhood 
instinctively maleficent,' pointing out that 'gentle, generous 
and disinterested children existed, just as surely as the 
egoistical and evil-disposed.' 

Tarde, who is a magistrate as well as a philosopher, criti- 
cised also the other theories of Lombroso : Madmen there 
doubtless were among criminals, but not every law-breaker 



THE CHILD AND THE CRIMINAL 357 

was a lunatic; the most degenerate are far from being the 
most criminal — indeed, the most dangerous criminals are often 
the least degenerate ; if there is a connection between the 
savage and the criminal, the recruiting of criminals more and 
more from the refined and corrupted environment of the great 
cities of modern civiUsation is fast destroying the resemblance ; 
and imitation counts for much, very much ; so, too, the 
sociological factors. 

Colajanni (116), rejecting physical atavism as the cause of 
crime, sought to find its explanation in 'psychic atavism,' 
'moral atavism,' his theory being founded upon 'the com- 
parison between the savages of to-day and civilised criminals, 
the analogy between criminals and children (a transitory re- 
production of the moral past of our ancestors), and the pos- 
session in common of certain traits by criminals and the 
lower classes, the belated ones of civilisation' (143, p. 121). 
Crime for him is a social, not a biological, product, but it is 
difficult to see how one can have ' psychic atavism ' without at 
least some sort of physical atavism. Thus Garofalo (143, 
p. 134), one of the most prominent of the Itahan crimino- 
logists, seeks an organic deviation upon which to base the 
psychic anomaly of crime. Garofalo considers the typical 
criminal ' a monster of the moral order, having characters in 
common with savages and other characters which belong even 
lower down than the human race ' j he is largely abnormal as 
compared with civilised man, not so much pathological as 
abnormal. He seems sometimes to lay emphasis on atavism 
to a bestial type preceding prehistoric man or the savage 
peoples of to-day. Another point which he raises is, that 
'while prehistoric man, living alone with his family, could 
have no conception whatever of altruistic sentiments, the 
criminal from birth lives in social surroundings, degraded, no 
jdoubt, but of which he deliberately ignores the duty' (216, 
p. 210). So, too, as to the connection with the child in some 
measure. 

With the partisans of the sociological school — for whom 
'crime is largely a social product' — the connections asserted 
by Lombroso lose their force, environment, education, family 
life, social contact, professions, condition of the working- 
classes, alcoholism, low forms of amusement and excitement, 
etc., being regarded as the great determining factors. 

Lacassagne, the head of the Lyons school, declares epi- 



35^ THE CHILD 

grammatically (143, p. 157) : 'The social milieu is the culture- 
broth of criminality ; the criminal is the microbe, an element 
having importance on that day alone when it finds the broth 
suited to make it ferment. Societies have only the criminals 
they deserve.' The criminal /^r se has a very mediocre import- 
ance ; he is not a type, since honest folks from time to time 
manifest one or all of his anthropological characters. Against 
the fatalism, which seems inevitably linked with the anthropo- 
metric theory of crime, Lacassagne places the ' social initiative.' 
Another able defender of the theory of the predominance of 
the social factor in the production of crime is Manouvrier 
(143, p. 161), in Paris; others of somew^hat the same mind 
are, in Russia, Orchansky ; in Belgium, Prins ; in Germany, 
Baer and Nacke ; in Italy, Morselli. 

Dr Kirn, of Freiburg, in Bavaria, writing in 1893, thus 
expresses his opinion of the criminal (327, p. 712) : 'Certainly 
the criminal, so far as character is concerned, has not the 
slightest in common with the primitive man or the child, for 
in both the last it is a question of as yet undeveloped moral 
idea, in the former we have to deal with a degeneration of 
character.' Crime is largely not an atavism but the result of 
human social relations, and criminal anthropology forms but 
one chapter in the anthropology of degeneracy. Occasional 
criminals, indeed, are, as a rule, mentally sound but weak 
morally. Criminals of passion, occasion and habit are none 
of them a separate type, atavistic or infantile. 

A searching criticism of the Lombrosan theories was 
published in 1896 by Professor D. Sernoff, of the University 
of Moscow, based upon anatomical investigations, and em- 
bodying the thesis that : ' The born criminal in Lombroso's 
sense has no real existence ; that being which, according to 
the description of Lombroso, is branded in germ by the stamp 
of lower animal organisms, and meets us in almost every 
second inmate of a prison — that Orang-Utang, as Taine calls 
him — does not exist in mankind' (586, p. 343). 

Orchansky, in his study, 'Russian Criminals and the 
Theory of Lombroso' (465), based upon the examination of 
some 3000 prisoners and 200 crania, controverts many of the 
chief tenets of the Italian criminologist. He finds no greater 
proportion of lunatics among criminals than among normal 
subjects, and no typical criminal physiognomy. For Orchansky 
' crime is the result of bad social hygiene.' In other words, it 



THE CHILD AND THE CRIMINAL 359 

• is ' not that bad people create crime, but that bad conditions 
make criminals out of the weak and the ignorant.' 

A recent Brazilian writer, Dr J. A. Peixoto, in his thesis 
on ' Epilepsy and Crime ' (483), holds that criminals are ' essen- 
tially normal individuals whom the society of the day has not 
been able to submit to its domination,' crime itself being a 
natural product of the social organism. Criminals, persisting 
through the ages, represent primitively, although now only 
' refractory beings,' some of the moving spirits in the formation 
of the earliest societies among men. AH ' refractory spirits,' 
however, are not criminals. Some, egoistic to the end, attack 
society and force it to serve their fears, ambitions, hates and 
passions, using the cannon, the sword or the torch ; others lift 
up against society the arms of speech and logic alone, moved 
by altruistic desires for its improvement and reformation. 
The world will always distinguish its Jesus from its Napoleon, 
its Alexander from its Tolstoi. Criminals, themselves, Peixoto 
thinks, fall into three chief categories: (i) The anti-social 
rebels ; (2) a mixed type, partly influenced by degeneration ; 
(3) a symptomatic type of complete mental degeneracy. 

Of the ' political criminal ' Lombroso and Proal have 
written at length, but, as Havelock Ellis observes (184, p. i), 
there are different sorts of political ' crime ' and different ways 
of rewarding it : ' Consequently the " political criminal " of one 
time or place may be the hero, martyr, saint of another land 
or age. The poUtical criminal is, as Lombroso calls him, " the 
true precursor of the progressive movement of humanity " ; or, 
as Benedikt calls him, the komo nobilis of whom the highest 
type is Christ.' Perhaps, after all, it is the ' political criminal ' 
who is responsible for much of the ' crime ' of childhood. 

One of the best books on the anti-Lombrosan side is 
Baer's Anthropological Study of the Criminal, which appeared 
in 1893. According to Baer, the skull of the criminal has 
nothing specific about it, the anomahes are, in all probability, 
mostly of a pathological nature, and the so-called 'atavistic 
signs ' are rare phenomena that may be met with almost 
anywhere among men ; nor does the body of the criminal in 
size and general characteristics of itself and its organs offer any- 
thing that can be looked upon as marking a special type, indeed 
some of the ' degenerate signs ' are really more common some- 
times in non-criminal individuals ; the much-talked-of ' criminal 
physiognomy ' also affords no special type ; the prevalence of 



360 THE CHILD 

left-handednesSj the pain-obtuseness and other supposed traits 
of criminals have been grossly exaggerated. In short, Baer 
holds that there is no ' criminal type,' no 'born criminal ' in 
the Lombrosan sense. Both the mental and the physical state 
of the criminal are those of the social class to which he belongs, 
the community of which he is a part. His anomalies of mind 
and body, when not distinctly pathological, spring from his 
environment ; arrests of development, chance and accident 
play their roles as well. Neither physically nor mentally is the 
criminal ' an atavistic phenomenon,' and he is comparable 
neither to the child nor to primitdve man (17). 

The Criminal and the Child. — In an address before a 
meeting of teachers in Turin, during the summer of 1895,^ 
Lombroso gave new expression to his views regarding crime 
and the child. Anger, lying, cruelty, lawlessness, excessive 
vanity and selfishness, obscene tendencies, passion for alcoholic 
drinks (the last hitherto much underestimated) are so character- 
istic of childhood as to make the great Itahan psychiatrist 
think very little of the purity and innocence often ascribed to 
the child, who, in reahty, manifests, during the early years of 
life, so many criminal tendencies that, especially with respect 
to moral feehng and actions, the habitual criminal seems to be 
one who has remained at the child's stage of development in 
these and other kindred matters. 

As Dr C. Ufer points out (657, p. 74), the book of Baer, j 
referred to above, contains an excellent presentation, from 
another point of view, of these phenomena of childhood of 
which so much has been made by writers of the Italian school. 
Many of the ' crimes ' and criminal tendencies of childhood 
and early youth, offences committed against property and 
person with a deliberation and a coolness hardly exceeded by 
the habitual criminal, are, Dr Baer thinks, often partly social, 
partly pathological in their origin, and in no wise absolutely 
inherent in child-nature. Thus town-life, where the harshness 
and soul-jarring character of the struggle for existence, and 
the sharing of young children in the support of the family and 
the household, develops precocious thinking, and cunning and 
astute employment of the moment to their own advantage, 
an abnormally early development of the intellectual side of 
life, often one-sidedly abnormal, since heart and feelings are 
repressed, neglected, or left undeveloped. Imitation, again, 
- An English version appeared in the Monist for October of the same year. 



THE CHILD AND THE CRIMINAL 361 

is another great factor in the production of the monstrosities 
of childhood, and the elucidation and preservation of criminal 
tendencies. At the most, many of the so-called ' criminal 
characteristics ' of children are psychopathic dispositions, for 
the further development of which on the way to crime and 
criminal phenomena opportunity and social milieu are the 
chief breeding-grounds. ) Altogether, Baer holds a much more 
favourable opinion of the child than do many more recent 
writers, even those who are not committed to the Lombrosan 
theory, granting his imperfect moral development but seeing 
no reason to denominate him a habitual criminal in embryo, 
his so-called ' degenerative signs ' being perfectly susceptible 
of other explanations. 

Dr Hannes Gross, a jurist and the author of an encyclo- 
paedic work on criminal psychology' (251), although almost 
a partisan of Lombroso in some of his views about woman, 
takes the idea of the naivete of childhood to heart. For him, 
children stand out in contrast to adults by reason of their 
' uncorrupted nature ' ; they are more upright and honest, and 
it is contact with the ' stupidity ' of adults that spoils children 
and breeds criminals. 

,. Havelock Elhs (184, p. 211) notes the precocity of crime 
in children (even expert professional criminals being produced, 
in India especially, before they are out of childhood's years), 
and the existence of ' a certain form of criminality almost 
peculiar to children, a form to which the term " moral insanity " 
may very fairly be ascribed.' This 'moral insanity,' which, 
often in combination with intellectual precocity, makes itself 
manifest between the ages of five and eleven, and is 'character- 
ised by a certain eccentricity of character, a dislike of family 
habits, an incapacity for education, a tendency to lying, 
together with astuteness and extraordinary cynicism, bad 
sexual habits, and cruelty towards animals and companions.' 
Moreover, ' these characters are but an exaggeration of the 
characters which, in a less degree, mark nearly all children,' 
thinks Mr Ellis, for ' the child is naturally, by his organisation, 
nearer to the animal, to the savage, to the criminal, than the 
adult,' and ' the charm of childhood for those who are not 
children lies largely in these qualities of frank egotism and 
reckless obedience to impulse.' Thus it happens that ' the 
criminal is an individual who, to some extent, remains a child 
his life long — a child of larger growth and with greater capacity 



362 THE CHILD 

for evil.' The adult criminal, in spite of the rarity of mental 
acuteness (which often marks young criminals), resembles chil- 
dren in many ways, impulsiveness, light-heartedness, easy-going 
character, etc. Even the convict, according to Dostoieffsky, 
is ' a child.' 

Compayre, in his study of the intellectual and moral 
development of the child (123, p. 303), considers as radically 
false the idea of the purity and innocence of childhood so 
beautifully spoken of by About and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, 
as well as the idea of those like Saint Augustine, who looked 
upon children as ' born for damnation.' Man, not being 
naturally a moral being, he only becomes so gradually, and 
the child can start with no approach to perfect morality, for 
in reality the child does naturally bad or good, and neither a 
panegyric nor an anathema of childhood is in order. To be 
fair, also, one must study the child under favourable circum- 
stances and normal conditions, and having done so one sees 
that ' the qualities of the child are often only the reflection of 
its parents, that child-character is, so to speak, a work written 
in collaboration, where it is hard to discover which parts really 
belong to each of the .collaborators, nature and education.' 
What Legouve has said of stealing : ' The child has not the 
instinct of theft ; he lacks the instinct of other people's pro- 
perty,' is one of many epigrams that are not without some 
truth. 

Faults of Childhood. — Compayre (123, p. 306) points out 
that it was 'a bachelor and a bishop who drew up most 
cleverly the indictment of the faults of childhood.' La 
Bruyere, in his chapter on ' Man,' written in the seventeenth 
century, declared : ' Children are haughty, disdainful, angry, 
envious, curious, interested, idle, fickle, timid, intemperate, 
lying, given to dissimulation; .... they do not like to 
suffer ill, but love to inflict it : they are already men.' 
Dupanloup, bishop of Orleans, in the nineteenth century, 
whose book on the ' Child ' has been translated into English, 
is, naturally, theologically-minded, and for him, as for St 
Augustine, 'childhood fairly pullulates with the beginnings 
of sins.' 

So far as science is concerned, however, it is in Germany 
that the ' faults ' and ' defects ' of childhood have, apart from 
the Lombrosan school, received most attention. Emminghaus' 
'Psychical Disturbances in Childhood' (191), published in 



THE CHILD AND THE CRIMINAL 363 

1887, was followed by Siegert's 'Problematic Child-Natures' 
(595) in 1889, Strtimpeirs 'Pedagogical Pathology' (619) in 
1890, Scholz's 'Character Defects of the Child' (579) in 1891, 
Kozle's ' Pedagogical Pathology in the Education of the 
Nineteenth Century' (333) in 1893, and other books and 
pamphlets of kindred sort, while, since 1896, a journal 
bearing the title Kifiderfehler has been published at Langen- 
salza under the direction of Professor Chr. Ufer. 

Child-types. — Siegert (595, p. 76), the text of whose essay is 
' do not wantonly and forcibly destroy the forms of nature, do 
not burst rudely and destructively in upon the problematic 
child-natures that are developing according to their own laws,' 
sketches briefly fifteen types of children, viz., melancholy, 
angel or devil, star-gazer, scatter-brain, apathetic, misanthropic, 
doubter and seeker, honourable, critical, eccentric, stupid, 
hxs&ooT^y-ndive^ with feeble memory, studious and blase. 
These classes together, according to Siegert, constitute some 
8 per cent, of all children, and teachers and the school-system 
are often responsible for their complete wreck or ruin, to say 
nothing of parents. Individual treatment here is the only 
means of change or salvation, and force is worse than nothing 
at all. 

Striimpell has gathered together from adults (educated and 
ignorant), teachers and others having to do with children, 
some 300 terms descriptive of their faults and defects, with 
notes on their synonymy, application, classification, their 
importance, distribution according to age, sex, etc., and place 
of origin in the organism. The dialect dictionaries would cer- 
tainly have furnished the author hundreds more epithets, at 
the very least, many of them much more picturesque than any 
in his list, but the number of such is almost endless, as under 
favourable circumstances language can name almost any 
peculiarity of the child, and child-types judged by these 
marks are as innumerable. And so many of these defects 
and faults belong to adults as well, that their characterisation 
as child-faults, because in childhood by stress of environment 
and surrounding they so often appear in exaggerated form, 
is very frequently altogether unjustifiable. Moreover, their 
importance as ' faults ' is further impaired by the fact that the 
child plays with them as he does with everything else his mind 
is at all seized of, as is well shown by Groos in his ' Plays of 
Man.' The school of the 'pedagogical pathologists' has over- 



364 THE CHILD 

estimated the value and importance of many of these ' defects/ 
the coining of names for which by adults is more dangerous as 
metaphysics than the child's simple vagary usually is or need 
be. And it must not be forgotten that it is the working, thmk- 
ing adult who, all the time, is thus 'sizing up,' so to speak, the 
playing, dreaming child, whose flashes of wisdom or unwisdom 
are all too often writ large by nurse, parent, friend, or teacher. 
Still Striimpell is more optiniistic than other writers, and be- 
lieves that the developmental capacity of the intellect is so 
strong that few defects of the kind under discussion are utterly 
incurable. 

For Scholz (579, p. 15), 'every child is, pedagogically 
speaking, to be considered mentally sound, that possesses a 
capacity of development favourable to the purposes of educa- 
tion in character and understanding.' The 'faults of char- 
acter ' he classifies according to the province of the psychic life 
in which they originate : i., Faults of feeling and sensation^ — 
here belong the melancholy, the sensitive, the capricious, the 
timid, the perplexed, the haughty, the proud, the stubborn, the 
vain, the saucy, the indolent, the easily moved, romantic, the 
mischievous child. 2. Faults in the reahn of ideas ^ — here belong 
the stupid, the distracted, the volatile, the sluggish-minded, 
the precocious, the fanciful and fanciless, the curious and the 
secretive, the disorderly, the uncleanly and the pedantic child. 
3. Faults of williiig a?id acting, — here belong the restless, the 
awkward, the silly, the covetous, the collecting, the deceitful 
and the thievish, the disagreeable, the envious, the malicious, 
the cruel, the unchaste, the destructive, and the lying child. 
In all these matters it is important to know ' whether the fault 
arises from defect or from excess, for it is easier to abolish 
than to build anew.' 

Dr P. Lesshaft (355, p. 16), who has paid special attention 
to the education of the child in the family, recognises^six very 
marked types among the children who enter school, viz., the 
hypocritical, the ambitious, the quiet, the effeminate-stupid, 
the bad-stupid, the depressed. Upon the entrance of these 
several types into the new environment of the school one sees 
the force of heredity and i^.m.i\y-7?iilieic with which the teacher 
has to contend. All through life, if the early type be main-^ 
tained, the hypocritical is under the influence of the diverse 
forms of lying and deceit, the ambitious controlled by the idea 
of superiority or greatness, the quiet by the forms of truth, the 



TFIE CHILD AND THE CRIMINAL 365 

Other types by pressure of circumstances. All these types may 
appear very early in the child's life. That, even in the child, 
individual character is 'a particular combination of diverse 
characteristics,' and not the excessively simple thing we are 
prone sometimes to imagine it, normally and abnormally, is 
clear from the investigations of Vitali (668, p. 94) on the 
temperaments, feelings and tendencies of Italian school-boys 
and school-girls of the Romagna, the researches of Riccardi as 
to the distribution of self-love, ambition, pride, vanity, atten- 
tion, studiousness, etc., among school children in Bologna and 
Modena; of Marro (404, p. 46) as to good, bad and medium 
conduct among the pupils in the gymnasiums and lyceums of 
Italian cities ; of Professor Sergi (585) and others concerning 
the ' sense of order ' in the school children of Arona, Samarate 
and other Italian cities; of Anfosso (13, p. 141) concerning 
honesty in school children, etc. 

While Riccardi notes that the years 11-15 seem to bring 
with them a decrease in some of the good qualities (studious- 
ness and attention, e.g.), and the child becomes less docile as 
regards the school and the teacher, it is interesting to find 
Professor G. B. Dal Lago, of Taranto, expressing himself as 
follows, in connection ,with the investigations of Professor 
Marro (404, p. 49): .^Up to 11 or 12 years children have, 
generally, no natural bent (indole) ; they rarely manifest 
personality, but like to be ruled, directed and corrected. 
Between the ages of 13 and 15 inclinations appear, and this 
period is the most dangerous. Animality and sensual wants 
manifest themselves, and reason is not sufficiently developed 
to act efficaciously as a check upon the instincts that pursue 
them. But after the fifteenth year the case is different, youths 
can be reasoned with, and, if natural talent aids, they are 
almost always to be saved by the persuasive word.' Riccardi 
considers that 'the nature of female education, the psychic 
character of woman, and the greater educative plasticity of 
the sex,' count for not a little in the more favourable showing 
girls make under the circumstances in question. It is often 
observed that with the best pupils the sex-differences are 
slight, the poor and bad pupils frequently showing the marked 
diversities. 

Misoneism. — In an interesting article on the nature and 
causes of political crime, Lombroso has given utterance to the 
view that a law of inertia, which he calls misoneism (' hatred of 



l66 THE CHILD 

the new,' 7ieophobid)^ governs the moral world. Everywhere 
he finds misoneism^ it dominates in all ages, and among all 
peoples ; language, institutions, customs, laws, all human 
thoughts and actions, like those of children and animals, can 
be explained only on the ground of constitutional miso7ieis7n. ^ 
Misoneism is a physiological characteristic of humanity — 
philoneisTu or 7ieophily ('the love of the new'), something 
pathological in the individual. Men must perforce crush or 
destroy him whose message is, ' Behold, I make all things 
new ! ' 

To this idea Lombroso returns in a later essay, a pessi- 
mistic review of the achievements of psychiatry. Of the great 
mass of men in the world, he tells us, it may be said fruges 
consu7nere tiati ; they are the slaves of habits, words, sounds, 
even to these they sacrifice ideas and oppose research, dis- 
covery, truth, science. For this reason ' we live in the false, 
for the false, with the false ; the true is only met with excep- 
tionally in the world.' Sacrifice and suffering are the con- 
comitants of all progress. Woman is subjugated and trained 
in deceit, the child is intiaiidated and schooled into con- 
servatism. 

M. S. Merlino, in his criticism of Lombroso's misoneistic 
philosophy, points out the fact that neophily and neophobia 
are of necessity relative terms, being but the oscillations of the 
pendulum of progress ; they are derived phenomena, functions 
of the law of man's adaptation to his environment. In other 
words : ' Man is neither neophobic nor neophile by nature ; 
from necessity he may be either.' The condition of progress, 
however, seems to be maintained by the preponderance of 
neophily over misoneism. Moreover, children and savages 
are not characteristically neophobic. If children have one 
peculiar capacity it is that of extri7tsecatio7t, ' that tendency to 
get out of themselves, to go beyond themselves, which the 
Germans call Selbst-E7tt/re77idu7ig, in English self-estra7ige77ie7it.'' 
When they are not overwhelmed with rules, formulse and 
methods, children, as their history in all ages and among all 
peoples shows, can learn almost anything, their power of 
imitation is almost infinite. As M. Merlino says, Lombroso 
forgets ' the insatiable curiosity of children, their charming im- 
portunity, their gracious prattle, the continual motion to which 
they give themselves up, to exercise at one and the same time 
their muscles and their thou2;ht, all their faculties and senses.' 



THE CHILD AND THE CRIMINAL ^6^ 

Savages, like children, are 'curious and impressionable.' 
Lombroso, in his account of them, fails to note ' the penetra- 
tion of their minds, their facility in learning languages, their 
love of novelties (remarked by ancient and modern travellers 
and observers), their admiration at objects of foreign manu- 
facture. 

William ElUs tells us that, even in the case of fire-arms 
(with whose deadly nature they were not unacquainted), fear 
was overcome by curiosity in the Tahitians. Cardinal 
Massaja, who was for thirty-five years a missionary in Ethiopia, 
tells of the eagerness with which the natives sought to be 
vaccinated, and Marsden reports a native of Sumatra as saying 
as he inspected a European clock : ' Are we not justly the 
slaves of a people able to invent and to construct so wonderful 
a mechanism.' Where they have not suffered from the in- 
justice and cruelty of the higher races primitive peoples are 
rather inclined to welcome the white man, being no more 
afraid of him than the birds and beasts, who have not yet 
learned to flee before him. The women, too, of the uncivil- 
ised races, far from being more misoneistic, as Lombroso 
supposes, are often the first to welcome the stranger. 

But all over the world there are neophiles and neophobes ; 
men, women and children, savage or civilised, may be 
neophile in one thing, neophobic in another — likes and 
dislikes are older than the race itself. Even Lombroso, as 
Merlino wittily says, is 'neophile in anthropology, but neo- 
phobic in sociology.' Even amid the beginnings of human 
gregariousness, to say nothing of the complexities and multi- 
farious phenomena of the social milieu of to-day, the individual 
instinct and reason (seen at work in every growing child) 
exclude Lombroso's sweeping generalities. Very often, too, it 
is a question not of an inherited tendency or quality, but of 
an acquired effect — 'the methods of education and of civil- 
isation have created the neophobes.' Neither the truancy of 
the child, nor the return of the educated savage to his original 
nakedness and forest shelter, is in itself a convincing proof of 
neophobia. In his self-chosen occupation the boy, and at 
home with his family in the forest the savage, gives abundant 
evidences of neophile tendencies both in thought and speech 
and deed. 

The Criminal Child. — The criminal child has been best 
studied by Ferriani, whose volume contains statistical and 



368 THE CHILD 

theoretical data of all sorts relating to juvenile crimes and 
offences. The author holds that, ' with few, few exceptions, the 
criminal carries the germ of his criminality with him out of 
his childhood ' (202, p. 5) ; the thorough study of the child 
must reveal the source of most, if not of all, crime. Of all 
factors in the production of crime the greatest are criminal 
environment, bad parents, bad homes, bad food, bad com- 
panions, bad books, bad conversation, etc. Lack of shame, 
selfishness, vanity, cruelty, lying, jealousy, envy, gluttony, 
anger, hate, idleness, vagabondage, self-abuse, prostitution, 
excessive work, carelessness, and bad example of the well- 
to-do classes, illegitimate parentage, suggestion, imitation, 
heredity, alcoholism, imbecility, are other powerful stimulants 
or causes of crime, which vary much with epoch, cHmate, race, 
sex, age, individual. 

The trinity of criminality, according to Ferriani, consists 
of 'the inherited tendency to crime, alcoholism and idiocy,' 
from whose sway society is all too slow to rescue the growing 
child. \The general belief that girls resemble bodily the father, 
boys the mother, may account for the fact that girls are dearer 
to the father, boys to the mother. Passions and criminal 
tendencies are as inheritable as any somatic characteristics. 
Ferriani cites with some approval the declaration of Ferri : 
' Men from the lowest and most anti-social strata are criminals 
from innate, irremediable tendencies.' 

Among the factors for which the child is in some sense 
himself responsible, gluttony and vanity are prominent, the 
one inciting to minor, the other to greater offences. Gluttony 
is, in some respects, the cardinal sin of childhood, and is 
a fertile mother of theft. Even among well-to-do school 
children this tendency breaks out. Here again, however, girls 
steal less frequently than boys. Ferriani gives the following 
figures from a boys' school and a girls' school for the period 
1889-1892: 

Out of 512 boys 209 were gluttonous — thefts, 62. 

Out of 287 girls 124 were gluttonous — thefts, 26. 

Vanity and boasting often play a very considerable role in 
the production of juvenile crime. Maironi observes : ' It is 
certain that to many youths the wish to make sport of justice, 
and to compel the authorities to busy themselves with them, 
leads by way of boasting to an irresistible tendency to evil-doing.' 

Out of 150 minor criminals Ferriani found that 15 were 



THE CHILD AND THE CRIMINAL 



369 



repentant, 48 indifferent, 70 boastful and pleased at publicity, 
while 17 despised justice (202, p. 27). 

Idleness. — The proverb, ' Idleness is the father of all crimes,' 
is, according to Ferriani (202, pp. 144-155), peculiarly appli- 
cable to childhood, for which idleness has native charms. 
Moreau says that ' idleness and vagabondage are almost always, 
with children, the source of crime.' Children do not need a 
prison so much as an occupation; and Corre holds that 
' crime, like prostitution, is nourished by idleness.' The fol- 
lowing table gives the figures as to idleness concerning 2000 
minor criminals studied by Ferriani : — 



AUogthe, 


Half-Idle. 


Active, but 
not fond 
of Work. 


(Like 1 
Work. 


Like Work 
from Fear of 
Punishment. 


8-10 years . . 217 
10-14 ,, • • 380 
14-18 „ . . ' 283 
18-20 ,, . . 232 


100 
175 

75 
195 


15 

25 
40 

152 


3 
12 

20 
44 


19 

8 

4 
I 


Total . . ' 1 1 12 


545 


232 79 


32 



Out of 2000 young criminals, 11 12 were completely idle, 
with a maximum of idleness at the age of eight to ten years. 
Even more significant is Ferriani's report of his personal inves- 
tigation of 145 criminal girls and 225 criminal boys as to the 
reason of their idleness : — 



Answers of Girls 

We are good for nothing . 

Work is wearisome . 

Our mother does not work 

Our father is a beggar 

We will work when we are 

'big' ..... 
Begging is nicer, for one can 

walk about at the same time. 
We eat little, why should we 

overexert ourselves ? 
When at work one cannot run 

about ..... 
Even begging costs effort 

Work and earn almost nothing . 



145 Answers of Boys 



We are good for nothing . 
Work is hard .... 
Our father does not work 

One must not always work 

Begging is work 

Our parents tell us that only the 
stupid work 



We run round all day (to beg), 

and have no time to work 
One earns more by stealing 



225 

48 
22 
25 

6 
14 



2 A 



370 



THE CHILD 



145 

4 



Answers of Girls 

There are soup-kitchens . 

We have worked too much ; we 

are tired .... 7 
Doing nothing is so fine . .18 



Answers of Boys . . .225 

Beggars live well . . -36 
We were dismissed by the mas- 
ter, why should we work ? . 18 
Doing nothing is a constant 
pleasure . . . -19 

Prostitutioji. — The statement of Lombroso and Ferrero 
that ' crime and prostitution are the two forms, mascuHne and 
feminine, of criminaUty ' has been disputed by Ferriani, who 
holds, with Florian, that, anthropologically considered, prosti- 
tution stands with male crime, but not psychologically : ' The 
criminal is driven to the deed by anti-social tendencies, by 
egoism; the woman is often impelled by hunger, by the 
poverty in which she lives, with no one to support her or to 
lead her among the thousand temptations which surround her, 
to become a prostitute.' 'Once a thief always a thief ' runs 
the proverb, but disgust at her trade often overtakes the prosti- 
tute ; men and women pity a prostitute, but hate a murderer. 
Bad example and bad surroundings, as Sighele and others have 
well shown, are the fertile creators of prostitution. There were 
in 1 88 1, in Italy, 10,422 inscribed prostitutes (aged 17-20 years, 
2953 ; 20-30 years, 5456 ; 30-40 years, 1588 ; over 40 years of 
age, 425). Of these 8393 were unmarried, 1358 married, and 
671 widows. The reasons given by themselves for taking up 
the prostitute's trade were as follows (202, pp. 160-165) • — 



Seduction by lover ..... 
Seduction by employer .... 
Abandonment by husband, 'parents,' or other members of 

family ...... 

Loss of husband, ' parents,' or other supporter of the family 

or from poverty .... 

Support of children, 'parents,' or other poor or sick mem 

bers of family . . . , . 

Instigation or depravity on the part of 'parents,' husband 

or other persons of the family . 
Instigation of lover, or other person apart from the family 
Crime or depravity .... 

Luxury ...... 



1653 
927 

794 
2139 

393 

400 
666 

2752 



' I never despair of youths who honour their mother,' says 
Ferriani (202, p. 202), and it is ' children of unknown parentage 
— Garofalo maintains that nine out of every ten such are ille- 
gitimate — that go to swell the population of jail and prison,' 
The following table shows the attraction which criminality has 
for such children : — ■ 



THE CHILD AND THE CRIMINAL 371 



Social Condition. 


Number of 
Persons. 


Relation to 
Crime. 


Of legitimate birth 
Of illegitimate birth 
Of unknown parentage . 


200 
200 
200 


1 

2i% 



Among 3000 minor criminals, Ferriani found 162 cases of 
unknown, and 10 1 of illegitimate parentage. 

Suggestion a?td Imttatio?i.^^\iggQs\ion and imitation, moral 
infection and contamination, are very powerful factors in the 
production of juvenile crime. In politics, especially in demo- 
cracies, the evil results of the ever-recurring statement 'you 
would have done just the same thing had you been in my 
(or his) place' are patent, and the politician's excuse is the. 
criminal's, with the same end, the dulling of resistance to 
unrighteousness and crime. The offences of such children as 
have continually only bad examples before them are largely 
due to imitation, and the case is much worse if it be true that 
the child has a natural tendency towards the bad. Sighele 
shows the influence of a single criminal in a group of two or more 
individuals, and the criminal leaders of groups of boys figure 
in all records of the darker side of city life ; often a boy, but a 
year or two older than the rest, is ' the secret soul, insinuator, 
and leader of the whole undertaking.' 

Sighele, from whose studies Le Bon and Tarde seem to 
have borrowed not a little, or at least sought and found 
inspiration, considers that ' suggestion is one of the principal 
factors in criminal association, if, indeed, it is not the unique 
factor' (598, p. 19). The criminal couple is the criminal crowd 
reduced to its simplest terms (double suicides, double lunacies, 
assassinations and other crimes for love, etc.), unless we admit 
here the obsessions, succubi and self- struggles of weak and 
degenerate personalities. In love, suicide comes first, then 
homicide, and with primitive peoples much the same state of 
affairs seems to exist. 

-^.^' In all Italy from 1880 to 1885 there were convicted of 
crimes against person and property 35,362 individuals, of 
whom 4825 were under 21 years of age, 1505 under 18, and 39 
not yet 14, and for petty offences the record is much worse. 
Conti attributes this juvenile depravity to the influence of three 



372 THE CHILD 

factors — the natural, the social, the in dividual — which practically, 
however, reduce themselves to two — heredity and family — the 
vast importance of which is emphasised by his detailed study 
of 150 children (average age 15-19) in the Royal Institution 
for Juvenile Offenders at Bologna. The majority of these 
children were imprisoned for vagabondage or paternal correc- 
tion, only 37 cases of real crime being noted, though un- 
natural offences and masturbation were very common. The 
absence of argot and the infrequency of tattooing (three 
cases only, religious symbols on the fore-arm) are striking. 
Another interesting fact is that 27 per cent, belonged to some- 
what numerous families, and 10 per cent, were born of parents 
who had been twice married. Of defectives there were among 
the 150 a hunchback, a deaf-mute, a cretin, 2 epileptics, 2 
cripples, 3 afflicted with seminal losses, 5 scurvy, and 6 
idiots. 

Setti, who deals with the crime of Bologna in 1887 — of 957 
minors accused, about two-thirds had parents, and the boys 
were five times as numerous as the girls — found that vaga- 
bondage w^as the chief offence, and that education is but an 
insufficient defence against the three great factors of juvenile 
crime — abandonment, poverty, example. From vagabondage 
to theft is but a step, and the steps after that are easier still. 
Family and milieu account for very much — at home, poverty, 
sickness, alcohohsm; in the street, corruption of all sorts. The 
child begins to roam about and falls into ways of evils he is 
utterly unable to resist. The Italian statistics generally speak 
eloquently in favour of the great power of the home-surround- 
ings and right suggestion in the prevention of crime and 
criminals.^ Suggestion, if we believe Professor W. von Bech- 
terew, who has written of its role in social life, is by no 
means correlated with the degree of intellectual development 
of the subject. Much in the life of the adult must un- 
doubtedly spring from the suggestion-influence experienced 
in early childhood. 

Nature of Youthful Crime. — The field of youthful crime is, 
in certain respects, quite limited. Ferriani observes : ' The 
principal forms of youthful crime are two — theft and wounding 
(or killing) — with a strong preponderance of the first, for, inde- 
pendent of all other considerations, the child making his first 
criminal steps begins ninety times out of a hundred with theft ' 
^ Arch, de F Anthr. Crini., HI, 368. 



THE CHILD AND THE CRIMINAL 373 

(202, p. 245). Indeed, it may be said that 'from eight to four- 
teen years the child is almost always a thief,' and from fourteen 
to the close of childhood's minority the thieving still predominates, 
though woundings, etc., now occur frequently.' But the par- 
ticular forms and expressions of child-crime vary with or are 
metamorphosed according to the social environment, forgery, 
cheating in trade, etc., requiring some little education, or social 
position, in order to make it possible for children to indulge in 
them to any great or deliberate extent. The crimes committed 
by 2000 minor criminals studied by Ferriani were as follows 
(many children figure several times for different offences) : — 

Crimes against the person (killing, 120; wounding, 

736) ....... 1102 

Crimes against good morals and family order . . 198 

Crimes against the State ..... 4 

Crimes against liberty (disturbances of the peace) . . 14 

Crimes against freedom of work (strikes) . . .16 

Crimes against public authority (resistance, etc.) . . 79 

Crimes against the administration of justice (hypocrisy, 

perjury, slander, etc.) . . . . -63 

Crimes against public order (conspiracy and incitement 

to crime) ...... 37 

Crimes against public confidence (forgery, etc. ) . .36 

Crimes of public harm (arson, injury to public ways) . 93 

Crimes against property (theft, robbery and unjust 

appropriation, 1332 ; receiving stolen goods, 301) . 175 1 
Crimes against penal code and against some special 
laws (begging, loi ; gambling, 26 ; drunkenness, 17, 
etc.) . ' . . . . . .442 



3835 



Average number of offences per individual, 1.9175. 



The statistics concerning 2000 minor criminals, based upon 
a dozen years' study and observation by Ferriani, are given 
below in condensed form, and with somewhat different arrange- 
ment from that of the author. They indicate at a glance the 
chief characteristics and peculiarities of child-crime in Italy : — 

Statistics concerning 2000 Minor Italian Criminals 
(Ferriani). 

' Male . . . . . . . 1540 

Female , , ,- , r . ,460 



374 



THE CHILD 



Age — 

8-IO years 
IO-I2 ,, 
12-14 jj 
14-16 ,, 
16-20 ,, 



Family — 

Of bad reputation . " . 

Completely depraved 

Of uncertain repute 

Bad examples .... 

Presence of condemned parents or relations 

Complete misery .... 

Children (relapsed) returned from institutions 



Parents or Relatives Punished for- 
Murder and homicide (wounding) 
Cruelty to children 
Offences against morals 
Resistance and riot 
Theft and unjust appropriation 
Fraud 
Carrying dangerous or forbidden weapons 

Education — 

Able to read and write 
Had further education 
Had higher instruction 
Analphabetic 

Natural Disposition of Criminals— 
Altogether idle 
Half-idle . 

Active, but not fond of work 
Fond of work 
Like work from fear of punishment 

Criaies against Person — 

Homicide .... 
Wounding .... 
Cruelty, slander, insult 



351 

240 

350 
465 
594 



701 
169 

53 

896 

207 

1758 

1604 



32. 
41 
38 
60 

141 
42 

112 



1336 
325 
129 
2ro 



1112 

545 

232 

79 

32 



126 
244 



Moral — 

Offences against morals, sexual immorality, etc. 

Cruelty and Destruction — 

Killing animals ..... 

Cruelty to animals ..... 

Disturbance of peace, insult to and resistance of authority 
Arson ...... 

Injury to public and private property , , 



198 



15 
17 

251 
79 
67 



THE CHILD AND THE CRIMINAL 



375 



Theft and Fraud — 




Theft 


. 1182 


Gleaning on others' land . . , . 
Robbery ...... 

Fraud, extortion, unjust appropriation, etc. 
Receiving stolen goods .... 


97 
10 

. 138 
• 301 


Deceit, Forging, etc.— 




Shamming crime . . 


26 


Slander ...... 


15 


Perjury ...... 

Counterfeiting and forgery .... 


18 
33 


Begging 

Carrying forbidden weapons 

Drunkenness ..... 


lOI 

45 
15 


Miscellaneous ..... 


. 188 



_.^ Mathieu, in his account of the French ' criminal child ' 
[(417), notes the alarming increase of juvenile crime in the last 
'50 or 60 years. During the period 1 830-1 880 the number of 
minors between the ages of 16 and 21 accused of crime had 
quadrupled, while that of adults has increased three-fold ; in 
1 881-1893 the number of child-criminals increased Jth as com- 
pared with an augmentation of -^th for adult offenders ; the 
amount of prostitution among minors seems to be on the 
increase, amounting to 40,000 in the last 10 years ; the suicides 
of children and youths have also increased, for in 1 836-1 840 the 
number of suicides of children under 16 years of age was 19, 
while during 1881-1894 it has increased from 51 to 75; the 
number of suicides of individuals between the ages of 16 and 
21 has augmented from 128 in 1836 to 243 in 1880, and 450 
in 1894. The only optimistic sign in the criminal horizon 
seems to be the fact that the number of young criminals for the 
year 1895 is 30,763, against 32,317 for the previous year, a 
slight oasis in the long desert of increase. 

The children of the criminal quarter of the city of Lyons, 
in France, have been made the subject of a special study by 
Raux. ! Only 13 per cent, of these young criminals seem to 
have been bad in spite of good influence and moral education, 
the enormous role of social and family environment being 
revealed by the fact that 87 per cent, seem to have been led 
into crime through the bad character, weakness, cruelty, in- 
difference, etc., of their parents, though doubtless many of 
these must have been hereditarily tainted and infected. The 
precocity of child-criminals appears in marked fashion, 76 per 



376 



THE CHILD 



cent, being between 13 and 16, 21 per cent, between 10 and 
12, and 3 per cent, even between 6 and 9 years of age. Of 
the crimes charged 19 per cent, were offences against the person 
and 61 per cent, against property. M. Raux notes that chil- 
dren whose offences are of a very grave character are in reality 
less vicious than 'young habitual vagabonds.' In the case of 
the former, moral reformation is possible, but the latter, poisoned 
by association with bad and immoral persons, have become 
regular gallows-birds. It is interesting to learn that out of 
100 released, 61 behave themselves well, 13 passably so, 26 
are lost sight of altogether (526). 

Pfeifer states that apart from the comparatively rare offences 
against morals, the criminality of German school children can 
be classed under two heads, viz. : i. Outbreaks of savagery 
and rudeness ; 2. Thieving of diverse kinds. The general in- 
crease of juvenile crime in Germany, and the relation in which 
it stands to the crime of adults, can be seen from the following 
statistics given by Pfeifer (491) : — 



Out of 100,000 Persons aged 12-15 years, 


Out of 100,000 Persons aged 15-1 


8 years, 


there were sentenced— 


there were sentenced— 




Offence 


1883 


l88q 


Offence 


1883 


1889 


Setting fire . 


2.3 


2-5 


Setting fire . 


2.7 


2.2 


Forcible lewdness 


4.2 


5-5 


Forcible lewdness 


^5-7 


19.8 


Simple theft 


237-7 


269.3 


Simple theft 


335-4 


344-2 


Robbery 


34.6 


42.7 


Robbery 


Si-4 


59-6 


Embezzling . 


13.0 


16.3 


Embezzling . 


40.2 


43-6 


Robbery 


0.5 


I.O 


Robbery 


1.3 


1-5 


Receiving stolen 






Receiving stolen 






goods 


10.2 


16.6 


goods 


16.2 


18.0 


Fraud . 


10.3 


14.0 


Fraud . 


32.7 


42.5 


Forgery 


2.4 


3-4 


Forgery 


9.0 


II. 9 


Injury to property 


22.0 


26.8 


Injury to property 


32.8 


44-5 



In 1889, of the crime between 12 and 18 years, the pro- 
portion between 12 and 15 years was : — 



Sex. 


General. 


Forcible 
Lewdness. 


Simple 
Theft. 


Robbery. 


Setting 
Fire. 


Male 
Female . 


36.8 

33-4 


22.0 
42.9 


48.2 
36.6 


43-7 
36.5 


43 
19 



THE CHILD AND THE CRIMINAL 



377 



It thus appears that for both boys and girls the most criminal 
period is from 15 to 18 years. 

The proportion of youthful (12-18 years) to adult individuals 
sentenced in 1889 for offences against the imperial laws of 
Germany was as follows : — 





All 
Offences. 


Theft. 


Robbery. 


Setting 
Fire. 


Moral 
Offences. 


Embezzle- 
ment. 


Fraud. 

91-5 
9-5 


Adults 
Youth 


90 

10 


79 
21 


7S 
25 


68 
32 


78 
22 


89-3 
10.7 



The conditions of juvenile crime in English-speaking 
countries are embodied in the work of Morrison on Juvenile 
Offenders^ published in 1897. In 1894, in England, there were 
26 in every 100,000 of the juvenile population under 12 years 
of age convicted of indictable offences; for the period 12-16, 
the proportion was 261, for that between the sixteenth and 
the twenty -first year, 330. In New South Wales, in 1890, the 
number of juvenile offenders under 20 out of the total popula- 
tion was 3372; between 20 and 40 years, 22,174; aged 40 and 
over, 13,022. In England the proportionate frequency of 
certain offences at the age of 16, and at the age of 16-21 
years, is as follows : Violence against the person, 1:2; 
offences against morals, 1:3 or 4 ; burglary, 1:4; simple 
theft, 1:1. In the year 1890 there were 23 homicides 
committed by children under 14 years of age, and 388 by 
individuals between the ages of 15 and 18, while the corre- 
sponding figures for England are o and 6 respectively. In the 
latter country there were, in 1893-94, 7 cases of manslaughter 
by individuals under 16, and 18 cases by individuals between 
16 and 20. Of the habitual offenders under 16 years of age 
in England in 1890, 85 per cent, were boys and 15 per cent, 
girls (the proportion in the industrial schools was 70 per cent, 
and 24 per cent), the corresponding numbers in the United 
States being 78 per cent, and 22 per cent. Of the boys 
released from the reform schools, 79 per cent, were 'doing 
well,' and of the girls 70 per cent., the corresponding figures 
for the industrial schools being '^d per cent, and "^t^ per cent, 
respectively. The inferior physical condition and greater 
mortality of industrial and reform school children is noted by 
Morrison, who also lays great stress upon environment as a 



37^ 



THE CHILD 



factor in criminality. Of the children in the reform schools in 
1 89 1, there were unable to read or write 17 per cent., able to 
read and write imperfectly, 70 per cent., with an ordinary 
common school education, 13 per cent.; of the children in 
the industrial schools in 1887-91, 2 per cent, were habitual 
criminals, 6 per cent, were deserted by their parents, 20 per 
cent, dependent on the mother, 14 per cent, dependent on the 
father, 4 per cent, had neither father nor mother, and 53 per 
cent, were either partly or wholly orphaned or had criminal 
parents. In some respects England and the United States 
seem to show an improvement in the amount and distribution 
of child-crime — indeed, England has been looked to as 'the 
one bright spot ' in all the horizon of juvenile crime. The 
unbiased study of the statistics, however, does not seem to be 
as encouraging as many would lead us to beheve. 

Roussel, in his study of orphan asylums and other child- 
saving institutions, has tabulated the punishments and their 
cause per 100 children during a period of 20 years (1860- 
1879), together with the rewards for good conduct during the 
same time ; the data are from the two reform schools of 
Ruisselede and Beernem in Belgium (404, p. 58) : — 





Boys. 


Girls. 


Punishments . 




3I-I 


25-7 


Rewards 


. 






31-3 


31-7 


Punishments due 


to altercations, etc. 






53-90 


17.4 


,, , 


, idleness, negligence 






1.80 


21.3 




, lack of neatness 






10.70 


24.7 




, unbecoming speech 






0.41 


14.6 




, indecent acts and speech 






1. 00 


0.24 




, refusal to work 






0.82 


1.26 




, infractions of discipline . 






19.00 


19.9 




, theft and attempts to steal 






9.60 


0.0 




, attempts and plots to desert 






1.70 


0.0 




, desertion 


0.72 


0.0 



So far as good conduct (rewarded) is concerned, girls and \ 
boys appear to be about on a level, while of distinctly bad 
conduct (punished) the latter show a considerably larger pro- 
portion than the former, with whom also the character of the 
offences leading to the infliction of the correction was les§ 
grave. 



THE CHILD AND THE CRIMINAL 379 

As Dr Marro notes, the boys excel in active, positive 
offences, altercations and fights, thefts, the only active offence 
in which the girls notably surpass the boys being ' sins of the 
tongue.' The offences in which the girls excel are passive or 
negative ones, such as idleness, negligence, lack of cleanliness 
and neatness, etc. (404, p. 65). Herein they resemble certain 
primitive peoples. 

Anfosso, who has made some investigations of the sense 
of honesty among Italian school-children, comes to the general 
conclusion (13, p. 141): 'Honesty is altruism. It is not pro- 
duced completely new in the child by the influence of environ- 
ment, education, etc., but is inherited in germ at least, 
developing itself first, however, toward the fifth or sixth year 
of life with the co-operation of the outward world. As in the 
embryo the phylogenetic development is repeated briefly in 
the individual, so in childhood and youth the individual runs 
through the various stages through which the race has passed 
in the progress from unlimited egoism to altruism.' 

Here we can trace the growth out of that selfishness which 
is the one trait of childhood to that altruism which is, in like 
manner, the one trait of youth. 

Siiidde.—Dmkhe'im, in his recent study of suicide (181), 
attributes the suicides occurring among primitive peoples to 
weak development of individuality, styling them altruistic as 
contrasted with egoistical suicides. The parallel here is between 
the soldier and the primitive races of men, with both of whom 
the military spirit and a kind of altruism are held to dominate. 
But this view is hardly tenable. 

Corre, who has written an excellent monograph on ' Crime 
and Suicide,' comes to the conclusion that 'insanity and 
suicide increase with civilisation,' a view entertained also by 
Morselli, and perhaps the great majority of modern writers on 
the subject. ^ Dr S. R. Steinmetz, from a careful examination 
of the ethnologic data concerning primitive peoples, disagrees 
with the opinion that suicide is exceedingly rare among the 
lower race of men, and observes : ' It seems probable .... 
that there is a greater propensity to suicide among savage than 
among civilised peoples, and that its frequency may be owing 
to the generally more positive faith in the future life existing in 
the former races, which enables them to meet death with greater 
calmness and a slighter resistance of the instinct and other 
natural motives tending to conservation of life, and finally the 



380 THE CHILD 

question suggests itself, that if suicide is one of the positive 
symptoms of moral degeneration, as Dr Winkler suggests, is 
it possible that moral degeneration is taking place among 
the primitive peoples?' (614, p. 60), 

Dr Steinmetz's view, that suicide is by no means infrequent 
among primitive peoples, is corroborated by the statement of 
Col. Mallery concerning the American aborigines (394, p. 132) : 
' Suicide is more common among Indians than is generally 
supposed, and even boys sometimes take their own lives.' A 
Dakota boy at one of the agencies shot himself rather than 
face his companions after his mother had whipped him, and a 
Pai-Ute boy at Camp McDermott, Nevada, tried to poison 
himself with wild parsnip because he was not well and strong 
like the other boys. The Pai-Utes usually eat the wild parsnip 
when bent on suicide. It is interesting to find that children 
commit suicide among primitive peoples often by taking 
vegetable poison like women. Suicides of girls ' because of 
jealousy, or from fear of marriage to those whom they do not 
love,' is common among the Dakotas and other Indian tribes 
(614, p. 55). 

The reasons for suicide among primitive peoples are often 
strikingly similar to those among children — fear of accusations, 
shame, disgrace, threats, scoldings, punishment, disappoint- 
ment, jealousy, brutal treatment, offended honour, illness, 
grief, etc. Of 49 cases of suicide among primitive peoples, 
recorded by various authorities, Steinmetz gives the 
causes as follows : Love, sorrow and related emotions, 20 ; 
offended pride and sensibility, 13; fear of slavery and cap- 
tivity, 5 ; depression and melancholy (from sickness, disap- 
pointment, etc.), 7 ; family quarrels, 4. 

Out of 289 cases of suicide of school-children in Prussia 
during the period 1 883-1 888, the chief causes, as given by 
Scholz (579, p. 160), were as follows: Fear of examinations 
and other reasons connected with school, 3 (boys 3, girls o) ; 
injured ambition, 19 (boys 18, girls i) ; fear of punishment, 70 
(boys 46, girls 24); harsh, undeserved treatment, 13 (boys 10, 
girls 3) ; vexation, despondency, etc., 8 (boys) ; weariness of 
life, 7 (boys 6, girls i) ; misfortune in love, 5 (boys 4, girls i). 

The sang-froid and premeditation which, according to M. 
Durand-Fardel (179), so often characterise child -suicides 
afford another parallel with primitive peoples, for with both the 
child and the savage an overpowering fear of death is absent. 



THE CHILD AND THE CRIMINAL 381 

It is worth noting here that Dr Tautain ^ reports that among 
the natives of the Marquesas Islands, of Polynesian stock, 
' suicide is almost confined to women,' vegetable poison being 
the method employed. The reasons given for these suicides 
are wounded amour-propre^ and a desire to be avenged upon 
the offender, rather than a wish to end one's existence. 

According to recent writers (183, p. 332), among civiHsed 
peoples at least, women show greater precocity in suicide than 
men, while the great increase in child-suicides, as compared 
with a century ago, may be only a passing phase of present 
civilisation, and not a permanent accompaniment of human 
progress in evolution — one that, like divorce, will ultimately 
normahse itself again. 

Lying. — There are some phenomena of childhood that in 
all ages have found denouncers, and defenders have been 
looked upon as quasi-criminal. 

An old proverb (found in EngUsh — ' Children and fools 
cannot lie ' ; ' Children and fools speak the truth ' \ ' Children 
and drunken people tell the truth.' German — ' Kinder und 
Narren sprechen die Wahrheit.' Greek — 'Children and fools 
speak the truth ') declares that children are incapable of lying. 
Mme. Necker, however, did not hesitate to say : ' Children, 
so ingenuous, so naive, are not always exactly true ; they 
dissimulate innocently, if one may say so, and there is in 
them a singular mixture of fifiesse and abandon.'' Again : ' A 
sort of ruse seems innate in children ; they have learned to 
avoid falsity in words, while they still lie in actions ' (455,1. 

P- 173)- 

Guyau declares that ' fiction is natural in children.' Nay, 
more : ' The lie is most often the first exercise of the im- 
agination, the first invention, the germ of art.' Indeed, 
' the lie is the first childish romance, and its object often is to 
embellish reality ; the romance of the philosopher, which is 
the metaphysical hypothesis, having ordinarily the same object, 
is sometimes the highest of fictions.' The same authority 
modifies his opinion just a little when he observes : ' The 
child is naturally inventive, without troubling himself about 
the reality of what he relates, when he is but slightly hypo- 
critical or dissimulating. Dissimulation, which is real lying, 
moral lying, is born in children only through fear' (259a, 
p. 148). 

^ VAnthrop., IX. p. 103. 



382 



THE CHILD 



1 



Dr G. Stanley Hall, in his study of ' Children's Lies ' (274), 
has collated the results of the tactful investigation of ' 300 
children of both sexes betAveen 12 and 14.' Seven kinds of 
lying are reported, as follows : — 

I. Systematised palliatives, insertion of qualifiers, casuistic 
word-splitting — the result oi pseudophobia. 

II. The lie-heroic — hes to justify noble ends, false con- 
fessions, theoretic or imagined self-sacrifice, etc. 

III. Truth for friends and lies for enemies — the subor- 
dination of truthfulness to personal likes and dislikes. 

IV. Selfish lies — cheating and false claims in games at 
school, false excuses, etc. 

V. Imagination and play lies — imitation, mimic panto- 
mime, 'making belief,' 'imaginary companions,' naming, 
comparing, etc. Much childish play owes its charm to self- 
deception. 

VI. Pseudomania (pathological lying) — 'passionate love of 
showing off,' false pretences, acting parts and attracting atten- 
tion, fooling, humbugging, etc. 

VII. Palliatives for lying that wounds the conscience, 
reiterations, repeated asseverations, reversing or neutraHsing 
lies to one's self. 

President Hall concludes that 'som.e forms of the habit of 
lying are so prevalent among young children that all illustra- 
tions of it like the above seem trite and commonplace. 
Thorough-going truthfulness comes hard and late^ and school 
life is now so full of temptation to falsehood that an honest 
child is its rarest as well as its noblest work.' 

Ferriani emphasises the diversity and characteristic nature 
of children's lying as opposed to the popular view of their 
' innocence ' of all such offences, what Bourdin calls ' the 
myth of the infallible openheartedness of the child '(202, pp. 
48-126). Children find it very easy to say 'no' and 'not,' 
and many ' lie in order to lie.' The distribution (according 
to origin) of the lies of 500 minor criminals, personally ob- 
served by Ferriani, is as follows : — 



I. 


From instinct and weak- 




6. 


From jealousy, envy, re- 




2. 
3. 


ness .... 
In self-defence . 
To ridicule others (vanity, 


472 
401 


7- 


venge .... 
From fancy and imagina- 
tion .... 


195 

488 




self-love) 


360 


8. 


From laziness . . 


370 


4. 

5- 


From imitation . 
From egoism . 


230 


9- 


From magnanimity . 


29 



THE CHILD AND THE CRIMINAL 383 

The great role of the imagination and the- comparatively insig- 
nificant part played in the production of lies by magnanimity 
are noteworthy, as is also the great preponderance of boys 
among child-liars. 

Lying is, perhaps, only one form of the deceit by which 
creatures seek to protect themselves. 

' Animal nature is one immense school of ruse and deceit,' 
says Fehx Plateau in his essay on ' Protective Resemblance.' 
Everywhere (sea, desert, forest) is this imitation, which, how- 
ever, is largely unconscious : ' The phenomenon of protective 
resemblance is general; there are hardly any animal forms 
which, at least in one of the phases of their existence, have no 
recourse to imitation. In our countries, in temperate Europe, 
in Belgium, one meets at every step cases of dissimulation, 
yielding in nothing to those of tropical nature' (495). 

Gelmini (241, p. 342) emphasises also the deceit, dissembl- 
ing, pretence, hypocrisy and ' seeming ' of all the lower orders 
of nature, as means given to the weak and feeble in order 
that they might survive in the struggle for existence, for where 
strength would fail victory comes from artifice. This same 
tendency to artifice and dissimulation, Gelmini thinks, is very 
strong with primitive and barbarous peoples, among whom lies, 
imposture, falsities of all sorts, flourish, and who (to judge by 
the experience of the Italians with the tribes of North-Eastern 
Africa) are double-faced, faithless beyond comprehension. So, 
too, the lower classes and the ignorant and criminal among 
civilised peoples, with their superstitions, mystifications, jug- 
gleries and deceptions innumerable — the preservation, as it were, 
of the strata of savagery and barbarism. It would take a long 
time, also, to catalogue the lies and dissimulations of the most 
cultured classes of the most civilised communities, the deceits 
and hypocrisies of the family, of society, of fashion, of wealth, 
of friendship, of learning, of trade, of art, of industry, of science 
even, and of religion, with its creeds and ceremonials. In a 
word, men and women ' lie with their feehngs and emotions, 
with their thoughts, inclinations and dispositions, with their 
words and their deeds ' — all are more or less liars, as the old 
saying has it. The environment into which the child is born 
is well suited in the great majority of cases to teach him the 
advantages and uses of lying. Women are more given to lying 
and deceit than men (the ignorant more than the cultivated and 
educated), boys less than girls, according to this author. 



384 THE CHILD 

With children lying is largely a means of self-defence, as it 
is with animals ; it is at first, without malice, a handy expedient 
for avoiding trouble and getting along in life with the least 
expenditure of effort, and a great deal of ingenuity may be 
employed before real hypocrisy is consciously manifest. Certain 
ingenious phenomena of lying in children of from four to six 
years of age, and even with children of seven or eight years, are 
' means of defence,' and become fixed and ineradicable only 
through environment and educational causes ; otherwise a 
salutary transformation takes place in most of them, whom 
fashion, customs, laws, etc., do not succeed in corrupting alto- 
gether with their education in deceit and subterfuge. Some of 
the ' deceits ' of children plainly indicate their nature as pro- 
tective devices — such, e.g., as keeping quite still, pretending to 
sleep, putting on a face, imitating the actions, posture, speech, 
etc., of others. In girls the disguising and dissimulation of 
feelings and thoughts is even more ingenious than is the case 
with boys, and exhibits often even more clearly the ' protective ' 
aspect. During this period the plastic minds of children are 
subject to the play of the environment, and not alone the fear 
of punishment but many other factors enter into the fixation of 
their lying and deceiving as permanent characteristics ; example 
is here all-important. But if the environment is honest, noble, 
truthful, just and sincere, the happy transformation takes place 
in the years of adolescence and youth, when arise the strength 
and the glory of love and truth, the despisal of artifice and 
circumlocution ; the beauty of sacrifice replaces the necessity 
of self-defence, the child with the ' protective ' mask becomes 
the youth with the serving soul. As aids to this end society 
needs the father and the mother whom it is safe for the child 
to imitate, the teacher who is not bound to rule by fear but 
by personality, who knows rather how to evoke the good than 
to exorcise the bad, to create atmospheres of truth, rectitude, 
justice, rather than to attempt the destruction of evil indi- 
vidualities that are more or less transitory and evanescent. 
There is much truth in Gelmini's very suggestive essay, though 
he overestimates the amount of lying and deceiving practised 
by primitive man. 

The testimony of children has fallen under the strict 
condemnation of many writers, who have no faith in the 
folk-ideal of the innocent child whose every word and action 
bespeak truth. Le Bon (351, p. ZS) observes: 'Better would 



THE CHILD AND THE CRIMINAL 385 

it be to settle the condemnation of an accused person by 
" heads and tails " than to decide it, as has been done so many 
times, on the testimony of a child.' The subject has been 
discussed in detail by Rassier and Motet, while Mr M. H. 
Small's paper on ' Methods of Manifesting the Instinct for 
Certainty' contains not a little of interest with respect to 
evidence, asseveration, pledges, oaths, etc., their individual and 
social significance among children, primitive races, and the 
various classes of civilised communities. It is probable that 
the truth-telling capacity, under right conditions, of the child 
uninfluenced by his scheming elders or fellows, like that of the 
savage, has been underestimated. The statement of so excel- 
lent an authority as Dr Washington Matthews (419, p. 5) : 'As 
the result of over thirty years' experience among Indians, I 
must say I have not found them less truthful than the 
average of our race,' would apply to many other primitive 
peoples as well. A proper understanding of motive and action 
is necessary with the child and the savage. 

Ethical Dualism. — The dualism of ethics, which is char- 
acteristic of so many primitive peoples, has' been discussed by 
Kulischer (338), who points out how common has been in the 
world the idea of law and all the protective devices of society 
for the members of one's own fellowship or tribe, but just the 
opposite for those of any other. Not alone the annals of war 
and conquest, the story of trade and commerce, but the 
history of religion as well is full of illustrations of this ancient 
theory. As Dr D. G. Brinton observes (74, p. 59) : ' In 
primitive culture and survivals there is a dual system of morals 
— the one of kindness, love, help and peace, applicable to the 
members of our own clan, tribe or community; the other of 
robbery, hatred, enmity and murder, to be practised against 
all the rest of the world ; and the latter is regarded as quite as 
much a sacred duty as the former.' It can easily be seen 
from these facts how ' ethics,' while a powerfully associative 
element in the one direction, becom.es dispersive or segregating 
in others, unless the sense of duty is taught as a universal and 
not as a class or national conception. 

This practice of ' aid, kindness, justice, truth and fair-dealing ' 
towards one group of individuals or of peoples, and of ' enmity, 
hatred, injury, falsehood and deceit ' towards the other, is present 
in well-marked survivals among even the most civilised and 
religious nations to-day (77, p. 228). The 'spoiling of the 
^■^ 2 B 



^S6 THE CHILD 

Egyptians,' the proverb caveat emptor^ the theory of a private 
and a public code of morals, the continuance of smuggling 
and the robbery of Governments by public servants, the lottery 
that still exists in the name of charity and the church, the 
' deals ' and tricks of the caucus and the political machine to 
which the ' good citizen ' so readily submits, the defence of a 
' brother ' at all hazards and with an utter disregard of law and 
justice by some secret societies, the ' honourable lying and 
noble deceit' gloried in by the fornicator and the adulterer, 
the fraud practised upon women before and after marriage, the 
widespread concealment of certain facts from children and 
youth, the signing of a creed by a minister who is far from 
believing its evident significance, and his ' one word for the 
congregation but another for his intelligent fellows ' — all these 
things, and many more, show how far we are still from the 
ideal of loving our neighbour as ourself. Not only does this 
dualism of ethics occur by survival in communities of civilised 
adults, but it is often one of the marked characteristics of 
childhood. An interesting instance is recorded by Miss Lom- 
broso (369, p. 77) of a boy of ten years who proposed to spend 
a piece of counterfeit money (given him) in a village ' where 
no one knows us.' The school-gangs, ward-gangs, secret 
societies of children, etc., in our great cities, offer numerous 
other examples of this duplex code of morals. Other sources 
of such illustrations are public and private schools, city children 
in the country, college-games and the like. 

The analogy between the ' boys'-gangs ' of cities, in the 
matter of ethics especially, with the primitive tribe or horde, has 
been very recently enlarged upon by Mr T. J. Browne (85). Mr 
Browne notes the double ethics, the consideration of strangers 
as enemies (who may be maltreated, lied to, or deceived), the 
stealing and predatory impulses combined with fidelity and 
stern repression of cowardice and ' peaching ' with respect to 
the gang, and the primitive activities primitively regulated — 
hunting, fishing, swimming, bird-nesting, orchard-robbing, hid- 
ing in the woods, etc. Here activity rather than imagination 
rules. And a cowboy rather than the naive liar of early youth 
is the result. 

The power which this double system of ethics still has in 
certain walks of modern society is well brought out in Proal's 
Political Crime (514). The practical result is the divorce of 
morality from politics ; in some ways the doctrine of one 



THE CHILD AND THE CRIMINAL ^^7 

private morality and another and different public one is more 
insidious than it was among the ancient Greeks, although it 
clearly does not pay, even according to rude utilitarian 
standards. According to Proal, state-interests cloak all sorts 
of iniquities which the private conscience really abhors — the 
deaths of philosophers and men of science, the martyrdom of 
Christians, the extermination of conquered races, the slaughter 
of mobs, etc. It is typified in a Bismarck who would not kill 
a fly in his study, but superintended the machinery which 
annihilated thousands on the battlefields of a great war. 

' Lucky ' Criminals. — An aspect of crime, to which society 
has not yet attached sufficient importance, for the cumulative 
effects of its influence are too often evident to the careful 
investigator, has been well studied by Ferriani in his volume 
on Cimning and Lucky Cri?ni?ials (203). It is hard to esti- 
mate the full amount of damage done to society by the dis- 
honesty that cannot be punished by law and the crimes that 
go unwhipped of justice — the result of the little lawless 
imperimn within the great imperium of law. The fraud, the 
trickery (white-gloved so often), the piaiping, the blows of 
mind and body that meet with no remorse, suffer no penalty 
or punishment, the illusions, the suggestings, the broken 
faith, the flattering promises — all these form an environment 
that can soon turn even well-born and well-minded children 
to ways of more open and audacious crime. Who can 
estimate the influence upon the growing child of the five 
classes of delinquents which Ferriani treats of — the unknown 
criminals ; those know^n but tolerated, even encouraged, by 
degenerate customs of the day ; those acquitted on account of 
insufficient evidence ; those freed by cunning or lack ; those 
condemned, but, thanks to their lawyer or their own good 
luck or astuteness, not at all in proportion to the crime com- 
mitted? The accomplices of criminals are not always the 
dishonest ; the best people, through misjudged humanity, to 
avoid trouble, for family reasons, through influence of politics, 
secret societies and the fike, not infrequently create impunity 
for the delinquent. And a large amount of the 'crime' that 
is just outside the scope of law or legislative enactment is 
committed by children and youth. A 'cunning' child is 
often as admired of the populace as of its parents. But there 
seems to be a certain relativity even here. Says Dr Washing- 
ton Matthews, in his brief essay on 'The Study of Ethics 



388 THE CHILD 

Among the Lower Races' (419, p. 3): 'If we find a com- 
munity of some 15,000 people wealthy and prosperous, living 
harmoniously together, having few quarrels, no murders, and 
yet no Courts of Law and no obvious punishments for breach 
of law, we may feel assured that they have some system of 
ethics which holds theui together and makes them live like a 
band of brothers. Such are the Navahos of New Mexico.' 
For a thief no punishment exists — ' if found with the stolen 
property he is expected to restore it, that is all.' With the 
Navahos 'the time is evidently not long gone by when with 
them, as among the Spartans, adroit theft was deemed 
honourable.' So also apparently with certain other crimes, 
' there is no executive power to enforce obedience to laws or 
to punish offenders.' But there are among this primitive 
people incentives to right-doing, 'loss of favour for wrong- 
doing,' ' belief in bad luck,' etc. Pure feelings of benevolence, 
however, with the Indian as with us, prompt to many acts and 
services performed without the shghtest hope or acceptance of 
reward. According to Dr Matthews, conscience also is a 
considerable restraining influence with the Navaho, much 
more than many writers have believed, especially among the 
more thoughtful and religious members of the tribe. Their 
asseverations, solemn protestations and rehgious declarations 
afford abundant proof of this, and when Torlino, the pagan 
Navaho priest, asked, ' Why should I lie to you ? ' appealing to 
the 'eyes' in earth, sky, night, sun, dawn, twilight, we feel 
with Dr Matthews that ' we have here in the eternal vigilance 
of many mysterious eyes a substitute for the All-seeing Eye 
and a distinct conception of the inward monitor.' 

Corporal Punish7ne?it. — Dr G. Stanley Hall,^ in his article 
on ' Moral Education and AVill-Training,' cites from Richter 
the record of a Swabian schoolmaster, named Haberle, as an 
example of the severity which once prevailed in Germany in 
the matter of punishment — truly a remarkable count for 51 
years and 7 months as a teacher: '911,527 blows with a 
cane; 124,010 with a rod; 20,989 with a ruler; 136,715 with 
the hand; 10,295 over the mouth; 7,905 boxes on the ear; 
1,115,800 snaps on the head; 22,763 nota bejies with Bible, 
catechism, hymn-book and grammar; 777 times boys had to 
kneel on peas; 613 times on triangular blocks of wood; 5001 
had to carry a timber mare and 1701 hold the rod high — the 
1 Pedag. Se/n., 11. p. 82. 



THE CHILD AND THE CRIMINAL 389 

last two being punishments of his own invention. Of the 
blows with the cane, 800,000 were for Latin vowels, and 
76,000 of those with the rod for Bible verses and hymns. He 
used a scolding vocabulary of over 3000 terms, of which one- 
third were of his own invention.' 

Against this punitory maximum Dr Hall, the gist of whose 
article is 'that only in so far as the primitive will of the child is 
wrong by nature are drastic reconstructions of any sort needed,' 
everything depending upon ' how aboriginal our goodness is,' 
and upon ' that better purity established by our mothers in 
the heart before the superfoetation of precept is possible,' 
ranges ' the now too common habit of coquetting for the 
child's favour, and tickling its ego with praises and prizes, 
and pedagogic pettifogging for its good-will, and sentimental 
fear of a judicious slap to rouse a spoiled child with no will 
to break, to make it keep step with the rest in conduct, 
instead of delaying a whole schoolroom to apply a subtle 
psychology of motive.' It may be true that 'even the worst 
punishments are but very faint types of what nature has in 
store in later life for some forms of perversity of will, and are 
better than sarcasm, ridicule or tasks as penalties,' but it is 
also a fact that very many primitive peoples, as Steinmetz 
shows in his voluminous but invaluable ' Ethnological Studies 
concerning the First Developments of Punishment,' have 
placed their reliance almost entirely upon 'sarcasm, ridicule 
and tasks as penalties,' and it by no means appears that in 
sparing the rod and the severe corporal punishments they 
have spoiled the child. Indeed, as Steinmetz says, the sur- 
prising phenomenon is the occurrence among so many people 
of a gentle yet positive education, markedly in contrast with 
the punitory systems (especially that of corporeal chastise- 
ment) in vogue amongst the civilised races of to-day, although, 
to be sure, stern discipline does find a place with a minority, 
of these uncivilised peoples (613, II. p. 203). Punishment 
of the sort most commonly employed in the last few centuries of 
European and American civiHsation (the contrasting of extreme 
militarism, perhaps, to the marionettism of the kindergarten) 
is certainly not the modus operandi of the greatest number of 
primitive peoples, with whom 'tender and even pampering 
treatment' is the rule and custom ; some of them, indeed, like 
the sea-Dyaks, hold that the more unruly and troublesome the 
boy the more valiant and worthy the man (613, II. p. 108) — 



»^ 



390 THE CHILD 

a belief, allowing for the difference between a Malay pirate 
and a German or American philosopher, not so very remote 
from some of current doctrines as to high-school pupils and 
collegians much favoured in certain academic quarters at the 
present day. And the modern educational reformer, who 
inveighs against striking down the child's soul by rude mental 
processes, might do worse than claim kinship with the 
American Indian who declared that striking the child's body 
injured its soul. But not all the children of primitive 
peoples are of the violent, boisterous and unruly sort. Not 
alone of the Malays can it truthfully be said, ' their children 
are very well behaved towards Europeans, and are superior to 
the Western child in many like respects.' 

According to Steinmetz, the origin of non-education and 
pampering of children among primitive peoples is manifold. 
Unrestrained love, precocity and early maturity, lack of strict 
norms and educational as well as moral ideals generally, the 
long association with the mother and her preponderating 
influence in the tribe (in the days of matriarchy), the life of 
the father outside the maternal home, the father's fear of his 
son (among those peoples who believed that the soul of the 
parent had passed into the new, young body of his son), and 
the need for the latter as heir and cult-preserver, etc. It is, 
therefore, not at all correct to say that the change from 
matriarchy to patriarchy was the sole, or always the chief, 
cause of the development of sterner methods of education and 
severe punishment of children among the more primitive races 
of man. 

Zaborowski^ criticises ]\Iakarewicz's attempt to derive 
punishment and justice from the primitive authority of the 
paterfamilias (the evolution of punishment consisting in the 
transference of this right to the tribal chief, then to the state), 
inclining to seek its origin in personal vengeance, acts which 
do not provoke the vengeance of anybody being looked upon 
as indifferent. Makarewicz's contention, however, that the 
three primitive forms of social reaction — public, social and 
instinctive vengeance ; paternal authority, whence arise later 
family and tribal jurisdiction, concentrated always in the 
hands of a single individual; and sacerdotal jurisdiction, 
extending to all acts outraging divinity — may exist simultane- 
ously or separately, is supported by much ethnographic testi- 
^ Arch, de NewoL, 1898, p. 523. 



THE CHILD AND THE CRIMINAL 39I 

mony, and the fact is not without example in the world of the 
lower animals. 

Corporal punishment, in the shape of flogging or whipping, 
is, according to Morrison, not recognised by the penal codes 
of France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Russia, Switzerland and 
Sweden, while in some form or other it is part of the criminal 
law of England, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, Denmark and 
several of the British colonies (Victoria, New South Wales, 
Canada) ; the state of Delaware, in America, has recently 
restored the whipping-post. Denmark seems to be 'the only 
civiHsed community where the whipping of girls is a punish- 
ment admitted by the criminal law ' ; in that country ' whipping 
is used for girls up to the age of 12, and for boys up to the 
age of 15,' and 'flogging is resorted to for youths between the 
ages of 15 and 18 if they are medically certified as fit to endure 
it.' In Norway 'whipping is a very common form of punish- 
ment for children between 10 and 15 years of age.' In 
England, where, in 1893, 2858 children were sentenced to be 
whipped, there are many safeguards for the offender — a light 
rod when the child is under ten, a limited number of strokes 
(not more than six when the child is under 12, nor more than 
twelve when he is under 14), private punishment, with a 
witness, medical consultation, etc. ; in Scotland, in 1893, there 
were 355 boys whipped, and in Ireland and the colonies the 
punishment is rare (in Victoria, during the seventeen years, 
1873-1890, only 44 were so punished, and in New South 
Wales, in 1890, none). Morrison notes that while in England 
and Scotland, according to the evidence of magistrates, 
teachers, etc., before the Royal Commission on Reformatory 
and Industrial Schools, 'national opinion, so far as it finds 
expression, is on the whole in favour of retaining corporal 
correction as a means of dealing with juvenile offenders,' it 
must be admitted that ' in so far as the statute books are to be 
taken as an index of the deliberate judgments of civilised 
communities, the balance of international opinion is hostile to 
whipping.' And, being so hostile, it is also in consonance 
with the views of most primitive peoples. 

Child Morals. — Children, at a very early age, ' are ex- 
pansive,' according to Miss Lombroso (369, p. 84), 'more 
through need of excitement than through real sensibility, for 
the same reason that they riot, shout and jump in their play,' 
and their apparent insensibiHty is largely due to their inability 



392 THE CHILD 

to feel loss, separation, death as pain. It has been said with 
no little truth that at this period of life, since play and excite- 
ment are the life of the child, ' he loves him alone who diverts 
him and appeals readily to his mind.' Remorse, even re- 
garding the mother, ' is born not so much from consciousness 
of error committed, as from fear of the loss of the love, the 
useful and necessary benevolence of the parent ; hence the 
child's pleasure and solicitude in overwhelming the mother 
with praise and caresses ' (369, p. 88). The affectivity of 
childhood generally is much weaker than that of adults, and 
is essentially jealous — egoistic, and we may say in brief: 
' The child tends not to love but to be loved and exclusively 
loved.' Cruelty, in children, perhaps, reduces itself 'to the 
fact of their impossibility to conceive the pain of others ' 
(369, p. 98). Altogether, 'the morality of childhood is much 
more negative than positive,' but the inherited savage-like vanity, 
egoism, simulation, cruelty of childhood, instincts so universal 
and yet so dangerous, are, after all, adapted to prepare the 
child in some measure for social life, for 'if the child were 
pure, good, ingenuous, without egoism and without simulation, 
he would experience much greater fatigue and uncertainty in 
orienting himself and winning in the struggle for life ' (369, 
p. 1 01). Na.ture, therefore, has been kind to him in having 
him born a little lower than those about him — the good angels 
of his environment. . 

'Morally,' Miss Lombroso tells us, 'the child differs 
perhaps less from us adults than he does mentally; the 
intelligence of the child passes through a series of evolu- 
tions, while his moral sentiments approach more nearly to 
ours, even from his first years' (369, p. 61). In fact, 'the 
same characteristic traits of us adults and civilised folk appear 
in the child, like a musical motif Xk^dX can have infinite variations, 
but whose fundamental note is always the same.' In the 
morals of the man and of the child this fundamental note is 
' self-protection, conservation of the ego, the desire of 
euierging, of procuring one's self the greatest number of 
advantages or pleasures possible, sparing at the same tim.e as 
much as possible one's own energies.' Hence, 'misoneism' in 
the child, its protest against the disturbance of its equilibrium, 
against the destruction of its pre-established notions, against 
constraint to think, against expenditure of all sorts of mental 
energy beyond the necessary minim.um. Since the child runs 



THE CHILD AND THE CRIMINAL 393 

over, in a few short years, the phases of the mental evolution 
of the race, there necessarily crops out in him much of the 
savage and of primitive man ; many children, indeed, seem to 
have innate in them the passion for lying, dissimulation and 
vanity, which can only be compared with the craft and falsity 
attributed to many savage peoples. Appeals to honour and 
justice, which the child has no comprehension of, must fail 
with such, and experience seems the only teacher fitted to 
instruct them : ' We cannot make such a child cease doing a 
certain thing, stop telling lies, no longer want things for 
himself, because they are bad ; it is better to make him see 
that his lie avails nothing and is soon found out, to make him 
understand by example, by taking from him when he is not 
willing to yield something to others, that he may feel as 
he makes others feel; by making him feel himself, when 
he is cruel, what physical pain is. This is one of the few 
means of educating the child ; better than repressing with 
threats or fatidical sentences the manifestations of feelings 
which, being instinctive, will break out again in other forms ' 
(369, p. 80). This spirit of calculation in the child, present 
unconsciously in even his instinctive acts, it may be 
his naive judgment of advantage and disadvantage, can 
thus often be appealed to successfully when no other line 
of least resistance is apparent in all his mental make-up. 
' Are there good and bad children ? ' asks Berenini, Italian 
deputy and lawyer, and his own answer runs (202, p. 401) : 
' No ! There are individual, sanguine, choleric, mild, active, 
quiet, etc., temperaments. The leadership of moral behaviour, 
however, is lacking, for it is the evidence of a gradually 
developing factor not yet attained — social life. To the child, 
then, all things are possible, good and bad and the thousand 
and one intervening stages ; only dispositions and tendencies 
are present and the results are whatever comes of the environ- 
ment, or of education, which is merely the substitution of one 
■milieu for another. The secret of preserving the good, the 
true office of education, lies 'not in sermons, harangues, idle 
talk, but in pure air, healthy food, good corporeal and mental 
exercise, the never-failing presence and example of moral 
customs and habits — the harmony of healthy social life.' 

Education and Crime. — The relation of education and in- 
struction to crime is thoroughly discussed by Ferriani, who 
cites the opinions of numerous a.uthorities ancient an(i 



394 THE CHILD 

modern. Himself believing that 'an ignorant honest man is 
worth a thousand educated rascals,' the author is not of those 
who see in education the eradicator of all crime. Victor 
Hugo was altogether too enthusiastic when he declared that 
' every new schoolhouse closed a jail ' ; there is a good deal 
of truth in the saying of Seymour : ' Knowledge is power 
not virtue, it held to both good and bad.' The bad example 
of 'state, school, family, the protective trinity of childhood,' 
often undoes all that their honest, sometimes even unified, 
aims have sought to accomplish, and very frequently the ideal 
— for men and women must have some sort of ideal — of the 
criminal takes the place of the ideal of the father, the mother, 
the teacher, the statesman. And too often the educated 
classes are the worst offenders, judged by their conven- 
tionalities, ' white lies, opportunism, loose ideas of morals and 
justice, defiance of law, and neglect of necessary duties ; love 
of money, weak consciences, hypocrisy are sometimes made 
doubly dangerous by needless education.' Ferriani holds that 
excessive education (companioned by fear, the instinct of 
defence, vanity, etc.) is a powerful factor in developing the 
germs of crime in children degenerately affected, and considers 
that, so far as education is concerned with the amelioration or 
the prevention of crime, the remedy lies in the increased use- 
fulness of the elementary schools — the foundation stone of all. 
The universities and academies, turning out so many graduates 
that the use of their diplomas often means the sale of their 
consciences, may be let alone by criminological educational 
reformers (202, pp. 339-409). 

Ciraoli, who has studied the criminal women of Naples, 
thus expresses his opinion of the various formative environ- 
ments of the young : ' The most notable institution for moral 
discipline is the home, the second the school, the last the city, 
the teacher of practical life. If a woman finds herself in the 
last without having made a suf^ciently lasting stay in the first, 
her moral education lacks its foundation, and the preparation 
in school is not enough to afford resistance against the charm 
with which city life has surrounded what the theologians call 
sin ' (202, p. 345). 

Safety lies in following out the idea of Cattaneo and 
beginning with separate elementary schools for the normal 
and the abnormal, the good being kept out of touch with the 
bad. But there must be harmony with the family and the 



THE C?IILD AND THE CRIMINAL 395 

state, the home and the city; everywhere, as far as possible, 
the degenerate must be kept from contaminating the strong 
and the virtuous; and rehgion, ethical and moral, such as 
really appeals to children, the faith that trusts and is not 
deceived, must play its role alike at home and in school. No 
education is worth anything that is without a psychological basis. 
Moreover, it must be fully recognised that no education can 
completely change the real precocious criminal, and that all 
attempts at the education of minor criminals must be based 
upon the individual study of the criminal himself or herself. 
K suum cuique of education is as necessary here as with the 
most normal individuals who form part of any given com- 
munity. 



y 



-:^^^ 




--\ 






AINU GIRL. 



(From Rep. U.S. Nat. Mus., 1890.) This picture — the lip-tattoo aids in the 
iUusion — illustrates the resemblances of the sexes so common among primitive 
peoples. 



CHAPTER X . 

THE CHILD AND WOMAN 

Sex Development. — The great biological distinction of the sexes, 
the development of which Geddes and Thomson have so 
admirably sketched, and the far-reaching results of which 
Havelock Ellis has so well summarised, is that woman pro- 
duces the ovum and man fertilises it. Hence all the morpho- 
logical peculiarities immediately connected with this difference 
are termed primarily sexual characters, although in the 
strictest sense only the sexual glands can be called primary, 
the external sexual organs being not the essential causative and 
determinative entities. Such other sexual peculiarities, as, to 
use the words of Havelock Ellis, ' by more highly differentiat- 
ing the sexes, help to make them more attractive to each 
other, and so to promote the union of the sperm-cell with the 
ovum-cell ' (183, p. 19), are styled secondary sexual characters. 
Kurella, however, taking the external sexual organs to be the 
real secondary characters, inclines to regard the characteristics 
just referred to (peculiarities of voice, hair, breasts, etc.) as 
tertiary sexual characteristics, while Ellis, who introduced 
the expression 'tertiary sexual characters,' prefers to apply 
the term to certain differences — such as the greater shallow- 
ness, proportionately, of the female skull, the greater size and 
activity of the thyroid gland in women, the smaller proportion 
of red blood corpuscles, the different relationship of the parts 
of the brain to each other — which are mostly matters of averages, 
and which, while not of great importance from the zoological 
point of view, are of considerable interest from the anthropo- 
logical point of view, very often of interest from the patho- 
logical point of view, and occasionally of great interest from 
the social point of view (183, p. 20). In the earliest stages 

397 



398 THE CHILD 

of the development of the human being, ' both male and 
female glands and sexual passages occur together and equally 
complete in the same individual, and in the majority of cases 
factors unknown to us decide which of these glands (together 
with its passage) shall survive and develop, and which rapidly 
degenerate until scarcely recognisable vestigia are left' 
(341, p. 236). The process by which the sperm-gland or the 
ovum-gland succeeds in acquiring its chance to further de- 
velopment may very well, Kurella remarks, be looked upon as 
' a struggle of the parts,' in the sense of Roux. At the time 
when this determination occurs, ' the external genitals 
(hitherto altogether of indifferent form, they have no double 
" Anlage"), receive an impulse to change into the female or the 
male type.' 

In early childhood, as is well known, the sexes are 
essentially distinguished only by what Kurella calls primary and 
secondary sexual characters, but somewhat later appear ' in- 
dications of the tertiary characters, which must be really latent 
in children more or less, else how could a father, himself 
showing no sign of them himself, transmit to his daughters 
tertiary peculiarities of his own mother ? ' As to which of the 
two groups of tertiary sexual characters is now to develop, the 
germ-glands, 'which during the first 12-14 years of life remain 
without function, determine.' If before they have commenced 
to function they are removed or become atrophied, we have, in 
general, ' the development not of the tertiary characters of the 
original sex, but that of the latent rudiment of the tertiary char- 
acters of the other sex.' If, for instance, the removal of the 
testicles or a morbid shrivehing of them takes place in a boy, 
' he gets a sort of female breast, becomes a gynaecomast ; other 
female characters appear also, and sometimes the result is 
infantilism, sometimes feminism.' It is fair to assume, argues 
Kurella, that the normal testicles contain some chemical 
substance, the presence of which hinders the development of 
the tertiary sexual characters of the female group, so that it 
may be said that ' the development of the breasts, the fat of 
the hips and thighs, etc., is not the result of an impulse pro- 
ceeding from the ripening ovaries, but the consequence of the 
fact that the latent rudiment of those structures are subject to 
no arrest on the part of the testicles.' Vice versa, although to a 
less degree, all this applies to woman, 'in whom the develop- 
ment of the ovaries arrests the progress of the tertiary male 



THE CHILD AND WOMAN 399 

characters latently present.' Three times in the life of the in- 
dividual, says Kurella, 'the germ-glands determine the most 
essential characters of the body. i. After the first sexual differ- 
entiation — when the form of the secondary sexual characters, 
the external genital organs, is determined. 2. At the time of 
puberty — the form of the tertiary characters all over the 
organism is fixed. 3. After the climacteric and in old age (in 
man) involution of a sexual sort sets in. After the climacteric, 
e.g., women often begin to grow a beard and take to politics, 
while in aging men analogous changes occur.' 

D'Aguanno, in his anthropological and sociological study 
of woman, notes that the more recent studies in embryology 
have ' triumphantly disproved the opinion of those who con- 
tended that the female was derived from an arrest of develop- 
ment of the male embryo' (i, p. 451), it being now known 
that the embryo, at a certain stage of its existence, contains 
within itself the elements of both sexes ; is in fact herma- 
phrodite, becoming male or female by the atrophy of one 
sexual character and the continued development of the other. 
It would, in reality, be just as true to state that the male arose 
from an arrested development of the female embryo as 
vice versa. 

Talbot, who considers that ' the female type, from the 
standpoint of bodily and nervous development, most nearly 
approximates the promise of the child type' (625, p. 273), 
holds that the forms of degeneracy known as infantilism, 
masculinism and feminism are ' practically arrests of develop- 
ment of the promise of the child type.' In infantilism the body 
(the face especially) or the nervous system (or both), or some 
particular organ or characteristic, is checked or arrested while 
the rest of the organism develops regularly and fully. Thus 
some people are in many respects physically children, and look 
young throughout, like the gamin of Paris described by 
Brouardel (143, p. 173). Mascuhnism originates when 'the 
female has proceeded so far in development as to have female 
organs and their functions while retaining traces of a pre- 
dominant character of the lower male type,' and feminism 
when 'the male has proceeded along the line of evolution 
toward the female type, but ere sex has been fixed, further 
development has been checked and the male type is finally 
assumed as the predominant one.' As arrests of development 
may occur at any point in the evolution of the indifferent type 



400 THE CHILD 

from which both sexes originate all sorts of combinations are 
possible, and not infrequently ' the nervous system takes one 
sexual ply, while the body takes another,' and we have, as it 
were, a male soul in a female body, or vice versa ; often the 
male possesses only a single marked female characteristic, 
or the female only one very notable male characteristic. 
Interesting discussions of some of the points involved are to 
be found in Meige, Ammon, and the numerous works on 
sexual pathology. 

Ammon, basing his conclusions upon the examination of 
some 23,000 conscripts, and the periodical measurement of 
several hundred individuals, observes, with reference to the 
nature and prevalence of infantilism and feminism : i. The 
infantile individuals found among conscripts aged 19-22 years 
are not all anomalies, the majority being the extremes of a long 
series of retarded individuals, who, in the course of time, will 
develop. 2. This transitory form of infantilism is principally 
found in individuals of small stature and smooth body. 3. 
Permanent infantilism is very rare among the conscripts, and 
occurs in individuals of all statures from the shortest to the 
tallest. 4. Feminism, manifesting itself by the development 
of lactic glands, is not rare in boys, but usually appears in a 
transitory form. It begins about the time of the development 
of puberty, and after having become more or less strikingly 
advanced, regression take place, with ultimate complete dis- 
appearance. 5. It is erroneous to consider feminism and 
permanent infantilism correlated. 6. When the growth of the 
lactic glands in youth does not suffer early arrest, these 
develop markedly, causing the breasts to resemble those of 
girls of fifteen, and no regression seems to occur. 6. The 
excessive development of these glands has no influence upon 
the development of the genital organs or upon that of the 
secondary sexual characters which evolve in quite the normal 
fashion. These extraordinary cases may have suggested to the 
Greek artists the idea of hermaphroditism. 

Hyperthelia (the presence of supernumerary nipples in males) 
has been exhaustively studied by Dr Karl von Bardeleben, 
upon whose suggestion examinations by physicians of the 
army were made of some 100,000 young men (mostly about 
twenty-one years of age) in connection with the recruitment 
for 1893. The total average for all the provinces of Prussia 
of individuals possessing supernumerary teats is 8.94 out of 



THE CHILD AND WOMAN 4OI 

955749 persons investigated, the percentages ranging in diverse 
localities from 0.5 in Dortmund to 31.5 in Lauban (Lower 
Silesia), differences so great that only the observer's faith in 
their own eyes could justify them in recording. The occurrence 
of high percentages in West Prussia, Posen, the parts of 
Silesia adjacent to Bohemia, Mecklenburg, etc., where the 
physically not yet Germanised Slavonic element is still to be 
found, leads the author to see in hyperthelia a valuable anthro- 
pological characteristic, serving to distinguish the Germanic 
from the Slavonic population in Prussia. Of the individuals 
possessing supernumerary nipples, 38 per cent, had them on the 
right side, 43 per cent, on the left, and 19 per cent, on both 
sides of the body. As to position, with respect to the normal 
nipple, the supernumerary ones were, seemingly, more frequent 
below than above it. Most of them lay in a line drawn from 
the shoulder or axilla to the genital region, the Unes on each 
side of the body crossing each other between the navel and 
the genitals, very few (except in Wiesbaden) occurring below 
the na.vel. The supernumerary nipple will usually be found 
about 8 cm. below the normal one, according to the author's 
summary, and somewhat oftener on the left side of the bcdy 
than on the right. It is an interesting fact that with the 
increased proportion of individuals possessing supernumerary 
nipples goes an increase in the number of supernumerary 
nipples observed in the individual ; thus in Mecklenburg, where 
the percentage is as high as 30 per cent, as many as 6 have 
been noted. 

A most interesting case of congenital hyperthelia has been 
reported by Herr von Brunn; twins (brothers), each had a 
supernumerary nipple on each side of the body below the 
normal ones. Henke correlates with the rudimentary nipples, 
the similar phenomena, wads of skin, little elevations of the 
skin, vascular knots, etc., which are very common, e.g., on the 
dorsal surface of the first metacarpal space. Kiikenthal, who 
has investigated the embryonal development of Cetaceae, has 
noted in an embryo of the Phocce?ia covimunis no fewer than 
eight primitive nipples (the adult animal has only two), and 
four in embryos of Monodon moiioceros and Glohiocephalus 
melas. The conclusion arrived at is that the ancestors of 
these species possessed more nipples than the adult members 
of the species do now, and some of these are reproduced in 
the embryo and young. 

2 C 



402 THE CHILD 

Dr L. I.aloy ^ thinks it probable that ' the reduction in the 
number of nipples stands in relation with the diminution of 
the number of young born at one time,' and suggests that 
polymastia women may give birth more frequently than others 
to twins. With Klaatsch he attributes the persistence of the 
pectoral pair of nipples alone in the primates and some other 
animals to tree-climbing, and the assumption of the vertical 
posture — such a position rendering easier and more comfort- 
able the transportation and suckling of the young. This 
atavistic peculiarity can be inherited — the statistics of Leich- 
tenstein show 7.6 per cent of heredity — and of 107 cases 99 
occurred on the thorax, 5 under the arm-pits, 2 on the back, 
and I each on the shoulder and the outside of the thigh. 

Sexual Perversmis. — ' Psycho-Sexual Degenerations ' have 
been discussed at length by many recent writers — Moll, Krafft- 
Ebing, etc. Silvio Venturi, in a large volume of general 
summaries and original observations, deals with these 
phenomena from a somewhat peculiar point of view. For 
him onanism is a sort of play preluding love. To cite his 
own words, ' the onanism of early adolescence is the embryo 
of what love will be later, a pleasure of body and mind.' In 
onanism the boy falls in love with himself, and his use of the 
sexual organ is a training-school for the future — 'the youth 
enters upon love of woman in like manner as the adolescent 
initiated onanism.' Love is the altruism, onanism the egoism 
of sexual instincts, according to Venturi. 

The opposite pole from onanism in the young is pimping 
in the old. Ferriani, in his study of 'Cunning and Lucky 
Criminals,' and Viazzi, in his work on sexual criminals, have 
recently emphasised the fact of the exercise of pimping by 
women, /(2r excellence^ not alone for the sake of emolument 
and lucre, or through morbid affection, material interest, 
vengeance, fatuity (examples of which abound in all ages — 
Greek nurses, Martha in Faust, the Countess of Candat in 
Bourget's Cceur de Fe7nme, Nicia in Machiavelli's Mandragola, 
etc.), but as an art, for art's sake. The large class of old 
women who in all countries are given to the exercise of 
disinterested pimping are, according to Viazzi, pursuing the 
art for the love of it, simply because they are visuals, in whom 
has taken place the substitution of an indirect for a direct 
representation of the sexual act, its preliminaries and its 
^ V Anthropologie, 1892, p. 189. 



THE CHILD AND WOMAN 403 

consequences ; in other words, woman, more easily than man 
(who, as many facts show, enjoys the sexual embrace more, 
and is more sensible of the enjoyments of physical love) is able 
to separate the idea and the image from the action, and, as 
disinterested pimper, reaches, so to speak, ' a social equivalent 
of physiological love' (664, p. 20). 

Phylogeny of Sexual Aberrations. — The phylogenetic and 
ontogenetic relations of sexual perversions have been studied 
from the point of view of an adherent of the Lombrosan 
school by Penta, whose ' firm belief in a criminal type, the 
born criminal, atavism, moral insanity as a disease per se^ 
etc.,' causes him at times to exaggerate and dogmatise, but 
many of whose observations are keen and suggestive. Penta, 
perhaps justly (and Nacke seems to agree with him on this 
point), holds that the history of the various sexual aberrations 
shows that our times are not at all worse than the early 
centuries of human civilisation, and notes the fact that most 
perversions have been at some time or other sanctified by 
religious sects. Since phylogenetically and ontogenetically 
human sexual intercourse is only ' an enlargement and exten- 
sion of the union of the zoosperm and the ovulum, represent- 
ing again the conjugation of many infusoria and protozoa,' and 
sexual pleasure has been developed from the pleasure of the 
sense of touch, even in the lowest forms of life devices have 
been provided for increasing and intensifying this pleasure, 
and for providing, in the higher forms of life, mutual means of 
attraction (song, ornament, etc.). Man is no exception to 
the rule. Penta points out many correspondences : Among 
primitive peoples the men are sometimes more ornamented 
and painted than the women ; the preference of civilised 
women even • yet for the brave man or the soldier, the exist- 
ence of marriage by capture among certain savage peoples, the 
frequent yielding of woman to a second suitor, the wrestling 
or fighting for a wife that still survives among the ignorant 
classes in some civilised communities ; all these are parallel to 
the struggles of animals in rut, and the actions of females at 
that time; in man, also, there still can be detected the 
element of cruelty and roughness that goes with the mating 
of some of the animals; at the time of puberty lawlessness 
and immorality increase, while with the waking of love in 
spring crimes of violence increase, and murder and crimes 
against morals increase with summer; the temporary unions 



404 THE CHILD 

of the animals find many analogues in the brief unions among 
some primitive peoples, and with early man, perhaps, as with 
the brutes, the female was his property, won and held by him 
against all others. The author remarks, further, that ' by 
reason of the struggle for existence heat could appear in 
animals only periodically, and during the short period of its 
existence the sexual pleasure was so violent as to keep with it 
traits of cruelty ; but in man, whose food-relations kept on 
improving, the sexual pleasure began to lose in violence, 
cruelty subsided, and sexual selection, together with civil- 
isation, gave to customs connected with sexual intercourse an 
increasingly milder form.' Penta believes that sexual aber- 
rations are mostly atavistic, ' a relapse into animal times, that 
allows the simple and older characters to appear ' ; amid all the 
heritage of culture and civilisation the original, 'animal nature 
sometimes crops out. The early appearance of the sexual 
impulse is itself atavistic, since, as Spencer has pointed out, 
the higher the species, the later the period of its appearance. 

Sexual Inversion and Auto-Ei^otism. — In a recent account 
of ' Sexual Inversion in Women,' Mr Havelock Ellis comes to 
the following conclusions, based upon a wide acquaintance 
with the literature of the subject and personal investigations : — 
I. A shght degree of homosexuality is commoner in women 
than in men, but well-marked and fully developed cases are 
rarer. 2. It shows itself with the evolution of puberty, and 
may be of peripheral or of central origin. 3. The rudimentary 
kind of homosexuality is more common among girls than 
among boys. 4. Homosexuality seems to be on the increase 
among women. 5. It is very frequent among prostitutes (185). 

In another very suggestive study of 'Auto-Erotism' (186), 
Mr Ellis discusses in detail 'the phenomena of spontaneous 
sexual emotion generated in the absence of an external stimulus 
proceeding, directly or indirectly, from another person.' These 
phenomena ' range from occasional voluptuous day-dreams, in 
which the subject is entirely passive, to the perpetual unashamed 
efforts at sexual self-manipulation witnessed among the insane,' 
the typical form of auto-erotism, however, being the occurrence 
of the sexual orgasm during sleep. Masturbation, one of the 
forms of auto-erotism, is common with many of the lower 
animals, and among many of the lower races of men practically 
universal with both sexes. 

Day-dreaming and solitary reveries, again, induce a sort of 



THE CHILD AND WOMAN 405 

/'psychic onanism,' which is 'largely cultivated by refined and 
f imaginative young men and women, who lead a chaste life and 
! would often be repelled by masturbation.' In these cases the 
'phenomena are largely normal, as is also the occurrence of the 
sexual orgasm and loss of semen in healthy individuals during 
sleep, although much of recent medico-scientific writing, as 
Ellis remarks, shows a tendency to see more of the abnormal 
in these phenomena. Masturbation seems really to have no 
age limit, and is probably more common in women than in 
men after adolescence ; at puberty and adolescence, occasional 
or frequent masturbation is very common in both sexes, but 
the rdle of the alluring and restraining factors of tradition, 
ignorance, imitation, etc., has not yet been sufficiently investi- 
gated to enable us to determine with exactness the relative sex- 
frequency. To these opinions Ellis adds further that the 
frequency of masturbation in the pubertal period and during 
adolescence is probably less than is commonly beheved, while 
the results of the saner studies of the last quarter of a century 
have cleared away much of the exaggeration of the writers who 
followed in the wake of Tissot, whose treatise on ' onanism ' 
appeared in 1760, and have created an interminable list of 
' supposed symptoms and results of masturbation,' almost all 
the ills of human flesh and spirit being credited to this vice. 
The psychiatrists, however, recognise still in masturbation a 
fertile cause of psychic anomalies, rather more, perhaps, than 
the facts warrant. As a ' natural result of unnatural circum- 
stances,' masturbation, when not carried to excess, does less 
good, and perhaps not more harm, than 'sexual intercourse 
practised with the same frequency in the same conditions of 
general health and age and circumstances,' to cite the opinion 
of Sir James Paget, as improved by Ellis. The 'nasty practice,' 
however, ought to be exceedingly rare in normal individuals en- 
joying healthy physical and mental life and right social milieu ; 
while, as regards auto-erotic phenomena, in the widest sense, 
' we are concerned, not with a form of insanity, not even neces- 
sarily with a form of depravity, but with the inevitable by-play 
of that mighty instinct on which the animal creation rests.' 

It may be that Mr Ellis takes too lenient a view of 
some of the phenomena of auto-erotism, but he is much 
more to be trusted than some of the ' nightmare ' writers in 
Germany and in English-speaking countries. Some authorities, 
indeed, go further than Ellis in the revolt against the 



406 THE CHILD 

Tissot school. Thus McClanahan^ thinks that 'the history 
of masturbation is identical with the history of the race,' and 
holds that its effects have been very greatly exaggerated, that, 
in fact, ' almost all males have masturbated without seriously 
endangering their health.' 

There is also noticeable a tendency to trace the origin 
of psycho-sexual and psychopathic phenomena almost wholly 
to the conditions of early life. According to Dr J. H. 
Schmuckler of Kiew, onanism is more a product of the 
home than of the school. The warm bed of the suckling, 
the irritation of the genital region due to uncleanliness, and 
later, creeping about, crawling on the floor; the nature of 
clothing, the use of alcoholic drinks, spiced foods, etc., 
dancing, riding, presence at erotic scenes and conversations, 
diseases of the skin, or of the genital organs, imitation, all 
these exert a powerful influence quite independent of school- 
attendance and school-life. - 

Dr Pasquale Penta, in discussing the case of a sexual 
invert, a man-servant (the domestic profession, as Tardieu 
and Legludic have noted, seems to favour the development 
of pederasty, etc.), whose child-life was made miserable by 
the violence of his father, points out how often 'sexual 
inversion is the effect of milieu and education rather than 
of any original abnormal sexual tendency.' A boy or youth 
of timid and yielding disposition, with the natural effect of a 
robust constitution destroyed by the domination of a tyrannical 
parent, enters upon the submissive career of a domestic, and 
falls a victim easily to the suggestion of a stronger mind, his 
own soul having been atrophied and its original germs of 
virility relegated to the sphere of the unconscious. Alcoholic 
heredity, paternal brutality, maternal weakness and passivity, 
go far towards accounting for the first appearance of homo- 
sexual tendencies, and the disappearance of the normal 
heterosexual phenomena. 

Luzenberger^ emphasises the disposition to sexual psycho- 
pathy resulting from forced attempts at coitus during child- 
hood, and from association with sexual pains suffered in the 
early years of life. That with individuals at all predisposed to 
degeneracy these factors exert a very powerful role is evident 

1 N. V. Aled. Journ., Oct. 9, 1 897. 

2 Arch.f. Kinderhlkde., 1898. 

3 Netirol. CbL, 1897. 



THE CHILD AND WOMAN 40; 

from_ the statistics of criminology. The sexual precocity of 
criminals and many degenerates is well known, although the 
lack of absolute certainty as to the corresponding figures in 
the case of normal individuals weakens the case against the 
abnormal. Taken altogether, it may be said that sexual 
abnormality, like sexual precocity, is, in man especially, a 
characteristic that detracts from his rounded perfection. As 
Dr Marro well says: 'The precocity of enjoyment of sexual 
pleasures deprives man of one of the most powerful factors of 
his civil character — the feeling of conquering the heart of 
woman with^the full development and perfection of his physical 
and moral qualities — a feeling which serves to enkindle youth 
and forms the most powerful spring to guide man on the road 
of work and of duty ' (404, p. 300). 

Here, if ever, the precept holds, 'being a child must not 
hinder becoming a man j becoming a man must not hinder 
being a child.' 

Develop7ne7it of the Sexual Insti?ict. — In his book on the 
psychology of the sexual instinct (552), Dr Joanny Roux, of 
the Lunatic Asylum at Lyons, has discussed in brief terms the 
evolution of love, the history of which is a tale of increasing 
durability with increase in complexity of the composing 
elements. All manifestations of the sexual instinct originate 
in a causal peripheral stimulus, which, after nervous action, is 
consciously perceived and subjected to co-operative influences 
on the part of the various senses, becoming more and more 
complex as the simpler nervous sub-stratum is left farther 
behind, then crystallising and systematising itself by aid of all 
the arts and devices of mankind for the complete utilising of 
the feelings and instincts of the race and of the individual — 
association, admiration, affection, love of approbation, flattery, 
pleasure of conquest and desire of power, modesty, curiosity, 
honour, fidelity, etc. Roux rejects the opinion (shared by 
Krafft-Ebing, Beaunis, Delbceuf, Tarchanoff and others) that 
the sexual instinct has its sole basis in the need of functioning 
of the genital organs, that the primum movens of the sexual 
need is the repletion of the seminal vesicles. 

The sexual appetite is simply the demand of an organ to 
function, and is satisfied with sexual connection ; sexual 
hunger (the need which the young girl feels throughout her 
entire organism, yet is able neither to localise nor to compre- 
hend)* is 'satisfied only in the union of two beings chosen by 



408 THE CHILD 

virtue of mysterious affinities.' The sexual appetite arouses 
desire only; from sexual hunger springs love. Hence it is 
that 'we love with all our body.' 

In the phylogenetic history of man's development, according 
to Roux, the olfactive sensations, the earliest to be differenti- 
ated from the general sensibility (a stage of evolution still 
present in the reptiles and amphibia), were naturally the first 
to be associated with the sexual need. In man visual sensations 
have dethroned the olfactive in their association with the 
sexual need, as art abundantly proves. Less important than 
sensations of sight in relation to sexual need are auditory sen- 
sations (in certain insects and birds they exert the first role)^ 
which, however, as the correlations of music and sexual 
erethism in man demonstrate, are very powerful. The gusta- 
tive sensations (in the normal man nearly nil) are so closely 
bound up with tactile sensations, that with the kiss on the lips 
it is difficult to separate gustation from the general and par- 
ticular contact of bodies and organs. In a certain sense love 
is the sacrifice of the individual to the species, and ' chastity 
the revenge of the individual upon the species,' the multifarious 
associations of both making them what they are and have 
been. The alliance of hate and love represents the revolt of the 
individual, the royalty of woman, the spirit of the race; modesty 
and shame the favouring of intellectual at the expense of physical 
selection; marriage the recognition of the right of the offspring 
to parental care until they have reached the adult state. 

Very rarely. Miss Lombroso holds (369, p. 102), are young 
children susceptible of real love ; they are too egotistic and 
wrapped up in themselves, although their passion and grief do 
sometimes show forth a potentiality of love, very latent, how- 
ever, in many cases. Precocious loves in early childhood are 
' a sort of hypergesthesia of affectivity, anomalous if not patho- 
logical.' Of such sort are De Goncourt's 'Cherie'; Renan with 
his ' Noemi ' ; Tolstoi with his ' Sonia ' ; Marie Baskirtseff with 
her 'Duke H.'; Rousseau with the girls ' Vulson' and 'Goton'; 
Berlioz with 'Miss Stella Gautier.' Miss Lombroso, however, is 
too sweeping in her conclusions, and the development of the 
feeling of love is, no doubt, more common in young children 
than she is willing to concede, seeing, as she does, 'a pro- 
vidential law ' in the fact that ' all children who present an ex- 
aggerated affectivity are anomalous or die early' (369, p. 113). 

Sexual Precocity. — Dr J. L. Morse, in a recent brief review of 



THE CHILD AND WOMAN 4O9 

the literature of ' Precocious Maturity ' in little girls, comes to 
the following conclusions (based upon the accounts given of some 
fifty cases) : i. Precocious maturity is a physiological congenital 
anomaly of development, and is not causally connected with 
rickets, hydrocephalus, lipomatosis, etc. 2. Menstruation 
(most often appearing, accompanied by ovulation, in the first 
two years) is never the first symptom, but is always preceded 
and accompanied by others. 3. The attributes of maturity 
are not all acquired before the age of seven or eight years. 4. 
Menstruation may continue as long as when it begins at the 
normal time. 5. Sexual desire is soon developed, and preg- 
nancy may occur early. 6. The mental development of such 
children is as a rule not as rapid as the physical and sexual, 
though some do show the mental characteristics and tastes of 
far older children, or even of adults. 7. Some signs of the 
condition (more than average weight, large brc asts, advanced 
state of genital organs, hair on vulva, or menstruation) were 
always manifest at birth. 8. The increase in height and weight 
(above the normal average in all cases observed) was rapid. 
9. The other pubertal characteristics observed varied in the 
order of their appearance and in their relative development, 
and sometimes preceded, sometimes followed, the first menstrua- 
tion. Many further details as to precocious maturity are given 
by Ploss, who cites forty-two cases, from all over the world, of 
physical and sexual maturity, menstruation, coitus, pregnancy, 
child-bearing, etc., during childhood (498, I. p. 244). 

The mammary glands have been known to function even in 
infancy. Such a case is reported by Dr J. B. Grover, of Peck- 
ville, Pa.^ The subject is a robust child (born Jan. 28, 1898) 
' having the general appearance of children of her age,' and the 
secretion of milk (microscopically identical with mother's milk) 
is 'so abundant that the mother is obliged to pump the milk out 
at least once daily,' the child being fretful until this is done. The 
secretion began to appear when the child was one week old. 

Among the factors which make for sexual precocity 
Dencker notes (161) : The social environment of modern city 
life (Rousseau's saying: 'Cities are the grave of man' applies 
here also), with its excitements and vices, its degeneration- 
phenomena, its nervous tension and its ' hurry to live,' mentally 
and physically ; the increase in the variety of foods and drinks 
(tea, coffee, wines and liquors, spices and condiments innu- 
1 Med. Rec, N.Y., Tuly 23, 189S. 



410 



THE CHILD 



merable, gastronomic titillation par- excellence) ; the family life 
of parents and the physical and mental education of the child 
in the early years of life (noises and unusual acts, artificial dis- 
turbances of nerves, pampering and weakening by indulgences, 
parents' awkward and unsatisfactory answers to childish inter- 
rogatories) ; school-life and associations (well termed by 
physicians ' the fearful years ') with their restraint and torture 
of body and mind, unnatural forcing of attention and interest, 
seeming decrease in the child's natural intelligence (with here 
and there a forced growth in mind or body), and their only 
compensations to the child dangerous dreams of the fancy and 
plays of the imagination ; that whereon the child is allowed to 
feed his soul — careless conversation of parents, elders or 
servants, bridleless talk of older companions, impure and 
suggestive jokes, stories and pictures, certain Bible verses, 
newspaper items — all these constituting a mass of suggestions 
that, together with the physical condition of the child, hasten 
the outburst of sexual life. A vast amount of evidence as to 
the sexual life of the country folk of Germany, and the causes 
of youthful corruption and depravity, is to be found in the 
published results of the investigations of pastors Wittenberg 
and Hiickstadt, whose pages are a sad record of that parental 
neglect which is the first great cause of child-crime (688). 

Woman's precocity of development is recorded of old-time. 
Dencker, with some venturesomeness, arranges the paralleUsm 
of development in the hum.an male and female as follows 
(i6i, p. 27):— 



Parallel Years of Life. 


Man . . 


1-3 


5 


6 


7 


9 


10 


II 


12 


13 


Woman . 


1-3 


4 


5 


6 


7 


8 


9 


10 


II 


Man . . 


14 


15 


17 


18 


20 


22 


24 


26 


27 


Woman . 


12 


13 


14 


15 


16 


17 


18 


19 


20-21 


Man". 


28 


30 


32 


34 


36 


38 


40 


41 


42 


Woman . 


22 


23 


24 


25 


26 


27 


28-30 


31 


32 


Man . 


43 


44 


45 


46 


48 


50 


52 


54 


56 


Woman . 


33 


34 


35 


36 


37 


38 


39 


40 


41 


Man. . 


58 


60 


61 


62 


63 


64 


65 


66 


67 


Woman . 


42 


43 


44 


45-47 


48 


49 


50-65 


66 


67 


Man . . 


68 


69 


70 


71 


72 










Woman . 


68 


69 


70 


71 


72 











THE CHILD AND WOMAN 



411 



From this it appears that during the first three (or four) 
years of life, the period of early childhood, no marked differ- 
ences of development between male and female occur. After 
that, however, a precocious development in girls occurs, giving 
them a lead over the boys, which increases from the 2-4 years 
at the attainment of puberty to about 10 at middle age, and 
even 15 later on in life — a levelling up, however, becoming 
very noticeable at 60, while at about 72 the sexes are together 
again. Corresponding to the undifferentiated period of early 
childhood, we have the undifferentiated (comparatively, at 
least) period of old age — the period ' de retour ' in more senses 
than one. These phenomena are explained by the two bio- 
logical laws of rapidity and slowness of development. The 
reversion is equally rapid with the evolution ; the slower the 
evolution has proceeded, the longer the period of culmxination. 

The parallelism of the various periods of life Dencker 
considers to be : — 



Periods. 


In Man- 
Years. 


In Woman- 
Years. 


First Childhood 


1-7 


1-6 


Boyhood and Girlhood 


7-15 


6-13 


Pubertal Development .... 


15-20 


13-15 


Prime 


20-32 


15-24 


Middle Age 


32-45 


24-35 


Epoch of Involution .... 


45-62 


35-44 


Extinction of Reproductive Power 


60-62 


43-45 


Extinction of Sexual Impulse 


62-75 


45-48 


Old Age . 


65 


65 



Dencker, it will be seen, makes ' middle age ' in man begin 
where, as we saw previously, his real ' infancy ' has hardly 
ended. 

Puberty.^Y)iQ pubertal epoch, in both sexes, is naturally 
a time of very great stress, and innumerable physical and psy- 
chical perturbations and abnormities find there a rich soil 
for development. The opinion of Marro that the period of 
greatest growth is also the period of minimum power to resist 
disease and sickness, shared also by Combe, of Lausanne, is 
opposed by Key, Hertel, Hartwell, and other more recent 
authorities in America, as detailed in Burke's comprehensive 



412 THE CPIlLD 

article on ' The Growth of Children in Height and Weight ' 
(91, p. 290). Much of the divergence of opinions, however, 
may be traced to inexactness in the deUmitation of the 
pubertal . periods at,d lack of agreement in the citation of 
diseases, etc. 

The existence of a special puberty-psychosis is denied by 
Wille, whose conclusion is based upon the study of 135 
adolescents (girls 65, boys 70), among whom he has met with 
all the common forms of mental disease (76 cases being simply 
mental affections, while 59 cases were accompanied by organic 
lesions). The most frequently occurring troubles were mania 
(29 cases) and melancholia (21 cases), paranoia (4 cases), 
being very rare, furnishing indeed but one really typical case — 
a youth of 20 years. It would seem, however, that while 
there is no special psychosis of puberty, the process of pubertal 
development does give to the psychoses occurring during that 
period a special impress, or modify them in particular 
fashion (683). 

Dr Marro recognises three pubertal stages in the develop- 
ment of the human being, viz., (a) preparatory stage ; {b) stage 
of accelerated development ; {c) stage of completion. The 
firbt stage is characterised, seemingly, by an arrest of growth in 
stature, nature seeking, as it were, to gather strength for the 
next period. It is marked also by the first signs of the greater 
development of the internal and external genital organs, and 
the first appearance of the pubic hairs ; by a certain improve- 
ment in the higher psychic attributes (attention, reflexion, 
judgment, etc.), and by an improvement likewise in social 
conduct as compared with previous years. The second and 
more critical period is one of more rapid growth in stature, 
vital capacity, etc., and by marked evolution of the physical 
sexual characters, and the great growth in stature and weight 
seems to be accompanied by an arrest of functional develop- 
ment and organic structure, so that a temporary weakness and 
lowering of the power of resistance takes place in the physical 
and moral faculties of the adolescent. This period stands next 
to first childhood in its minimum power of resistance, revealing 
itself also in instability and impropriety of character. The 
period of greatest growth is thus the period of great physical 
weakness and inability to resist disease for both sexes. During 
this period, however, the foundations of later individuality and 
psychic differentiation and consistency which mature in the 



THE CHILD AND WOMAN 413 

third period begin to be laid. In this third period occurs the 
greatest assimilation of materials and the inauguration of the 
process of elaboration, and the evolution of individual differ- 
ences, and the face reflects the character-transformation that 
is going on. A new being has, in fact, arisen, or is arising, 
and whatever of genius is hereafter to be revealed in all its 
fulness lets flash a spark here and there. Now woman shows 
what Venturi calls her two undoubted traits of genius — her 
somatic beauty and her gift of seduction. Her whole being is 
illuminated, her eyes speak and all her motions are eloquence. 
She feels and exercises her right to attention, admiration, love. 
Her soul now receives the repose of her sex after the disturb- 
ance of the first menstrual flow. The young man too is 
flooded with innovations physical and psychical. The agitation 
of earlier years settles into calm, thoughtlessness changes to 
action. He feels his strength and prepares to go forth to 
conquer and to love. The regularity that betokens fecund 
activity makes its appearance and the highest intelligence 
dawns in the mind. 

The peculiar change that often takes place in the individual 
after the establishment of puberty has been noted by many 
writers, ancient and modern, and figures in the proverbs and 
folk-wit of all lands. 'It is a fact of daily observation,' says 
Dr Marro, 'that boys who manifest the most ungovernable 
temper and pass through a period of maximum restlessness so 
that they seem to promise nothing good at all, showing, instead, 
all the characteristics of moral insanity, change their character, 
as if by magic, as soon as the pubertal epoch is over, and take 
on firmness, aptitude and propensity to work.' 

The ' dawn of intelligence ' is a very ancient figure of 
speech, both in the Old World and in the New. Miss AHce C. 
Fletcher, writing of the Omaha Indians, with whom and with 
whose language she has had a long and intimate acquaintance, 
says (211, p. 333):— 

' " Wa-zhi'^-ska " is the word which designates the time when 
a youth, having passed the period of childhood, has reached the 
stage when he can enter upon a season of fasting and prayer in 
order to secure a vision. The mind of the child is said to be 
dark ; he is like one in the night, unable to distinguish objects ; 
as he grows older, light begins to dawn, and when he can 
distinctly remember and can place in order the sequence of 
events of which he has been cognisant, then his mind is said 



414 THE CHILD 

to be becoming " white," and he is approaching the suitable 
mental condition to enter upon the rite which may bring him 
into personal relations with Waka'^'-da, as manifested in con- 
crete form through the medium of the vision. The use of the 
word wa-zW-ska to indicate this period in the life of a man is 
significant in view of the meaning of the word itself and of the 
importance to the man of the rite he is about to practise.' 

In Arabic ' maidenhood ' and ' the beginning of morning' 
are often poetically expressed by the same word. According 
to Drs Barbaud and Lefevre, in their study of puberty in 
woman, with the first menstruation, what was before the 
sketch becomes 'a little woman.' She who fell asleep a child 
wakes up a woman. The modest chrysalis of yesterday has 
changed into the brilliant butterfly of to-day. 

The 'making of men' and the 'making of women,' the 
ceremonies of adolescence and puberty among primitive 
peoples, concerning which many details are given in Floss's 
encyclopaedic volumes on Woman and the Child, and in the 
extensive periodical literature of the subject, have recently 
again attracted the attention of the psychologists and 
philosophers. 

Dr A. Ho Daniels, in his discussion of ' Regeneration,' 
shows how remarkably primitive peoples and religious societies 
of all times and races have, in their ceremonies, initiatory rites, 
etc., recognised the ' decided awakening of the intellectual life, 
and the ' decided change in the moral life ' towards altruism 
and social sexuality which take place at puberty — adolescence, 
the period of ' new life ' by nature, being also the time for the 
' new life ' of the spirit. President Hall, in his discussion of 
'Initiations into Adolescence,' has also emphasised the im- 
portance of puberty-lore for child-study, while numerous lesser 
writers have followed in the footsteps of Dr W. H. Burnham's 
earlier article on ' The Study of Adolescence,' a psychological 
interpretation of the truth contained in Rousseau's epigram, 
' we are born twice — once to exist and again to live ; once as to 
species and again with regard to sex' (96, p. 174). 

Dr Antonio Marro, whose volume on ' Puberty in Man and 
Woman, studied from the point of view of Anthropology, 
Psychiatry, Pedagogy and Sociology ' contains a mine of 
scientific facts and information on all aspects of the subject, 
has more recently published a brief article on ' The Pubertal 
Epoch in Folk-Use and Folk-Custom,' in which are summarised 



THE CHILD AND WOMAN 4T5 

some of the most noteworthy folk-usages in connection with 
the transition of the human being from a Ufe which, especially 
with civilised peoples, is more or less parasitic, to one that is 
more or less independent and altruistic. Marro points out 
how much, even with the institution of the public school, etc., 
we have lost in comparison with the savage and the barbarian 
in the social appreciation of puberty and its significance. 
About the only rehc of the old initiation ceremonies is military 
service, which, in many countries, takes the male, towards the 
close of the transition to mature youth, and teaches him a very 
special and not very useful art, and on the moral side a similarly 
equivocal obedience to authority ; all the civic virtues, family 
life (upon which the State depends) even, are ignored, injured 
even, fitness to march and to fight being the one end and aim 
held in view all too often. The initiation into civil life has 
not kept pace with the growth of culture. We retain somewhat 
the primitive recognition of the puberty of the body, but 
neglect, as primitive peoples did not, the puberty of the mind, 
of the soul. And, with us, girls are much worse off than boys. 
V/oman and the Child. — ' Women and Children ' — the phrase 
ran glibly from the tongues of the ancients, as it continues to 
do from the tongues and pens of many moderns, with no real 
consciousness of the deep significance of such a linking to- 
gether. Peasant's jest, gibe of soldier, sarcasm of philosopher, 
bachelor's witticism, have for ages taught the world to believe 
that women are like children in being weak and 'not-man.' 
Mr Crawley's detailed account of ' Sexual Taboo ' informs us 
in what manner men have written down women as 'weaker 
vessels,' socially, politically, religiously, extending the dictum 
of their inferiority even to the next world at times, and more 
than once denying them the possession of a human soul, while, 
on the other hand, Professor Mason's Woman's Share m 
Primitive Cidture reveals to us how much of the material art 
and science, by virtue of which the race has risen from the 
lowest barbarism to the highest culture, is due to the thinking 
brain and the labouring hand of woman. Indeed, in his 
multiform recapitulation to-day, the child is what he is by reason 
of the past represented by his mother, the first poet and the 
first priest, the first food-bringer, weaver, skin-dresser, potter, 
beast of burden, jack-at-all-trades, artist, linguist, founder of 
society and patron of religion, for in many, if not in all these 
forms of human activity, man has simply followed the elder 



4i6 



THE CHILD 



woman. There is ample justification, therefore, for the 
panegyric of Reclus upon woman, to whom ' mankind owes 
all that has made us men,' and who was ' the creator of the 




t 



"f ' it 



% 



THE LATE CHIEF ' VANISHING SMOKE,' OF THE MOHAWKS OF THE 
GRAND RIVEK, ONTARIO, CANADA. 

(From Jie/>. Prcn'. ArchcBol. Mus., Oniario, 1898.) The face illustrates the 
resemblance of the sexes in old age. 

primordial elements of civilisation' (529, p. 51). Woman, 
who covered her unborn child with her own body, was the first 
architect ; woman, who spared her own offspring, 'the mother 



THE CHILD AND WOMAN 417 

of the pastoral art ' ; woman, who ripened the fruit within her 
own womb, the first agriculturist. Not merely, then, as being 
weak, does woman resemble the child, but as being in very 
truth Wi^fons etorigo of humanity. The pride of the male in 
ages of mihtarism and masculine authority, forgetting the 
times of matriarchy and the political genius of woman, still 
easily discernible, has obscured the original nearness of man and 
woman, exaggerated the differences between the sexes, many of 
them the result of social circumstances and adaptations, and 
shut its eye to the inevitable rapprochement which was bound to 
set in when the victory of peace and industrialism over war and 
mihtary conquest began to assert itself. 

The difference between the sexes (in some of the lower 
classes of animals the distinctions are practically nil or the 
female is more favoured, as among the termites, cochineal- 
insect, etc., and many fishes, etc.) increases with the rise in 
the scale and progress of animal development (the superiority 
of the male becoming more marked from the birds up), reaches 
its acme in man and seems with him to increase with civilisa- 
tion and culture. Some of the exceptions and limitations to 
this theory are well discussed in Havelock Ellis's Ma7i ajid 
Woman, from which we learn that woman, because she repre- 
sents the race-type of the future humanity better than man, is 
already shaping man in her image ; physically, mentally, even 
socially and industrially woman has been leading man on, and 
feminisation, in the proper sense of that term, is one of the 
marked tendencies of our modern complex civilisation. The 
smaller and smaller role of militarism (the effect of which, 
in all ages, has been to divert man from the womanly type), 
and the increasing industrialism of modern civilisation 
(' the industries belonged primitively to women and they 
tend to make men like women 'j, together with the 
innumerable facilities for nutrition and the increasing con- 
veniences of locomotion and human activities in general, all 
tend towards an approximation of man and woman, which 
represents the highest effort of the race to make the best of 
life in all its varieties and vicissitudes. If nature made little 
difference, in many respects, between the savage man and 
woman in their circumscribed milieu, she is assuredly drawing 
them together again, after centuries of artificial and accidental 
divergence, in the new, illimitable environment of modern 
culture. 

2 D 



418 



THE CHILI) 



Chief Sexual Diffe7-ences. — The sexual differences, physical, 
physiological and psychical, have been studied by many inves- 
tigators from Ackerman in 1788 and Burdach in 1 826-1840, 
down to the present time ; the best general summary is to be 
found in Havelock Ellis's Man and Woman. The following 
list, compiled from numerous authorities, contains some of the 
chief differences observed. 

In this list the characteristics marked"^ are those, among 
others, which woman seems to possess more or less in common 
with the child, and which have made possible the theory of 
the resemblance physically, physiologically and psychically of 
the child-type and the female type now held by many excellent 
authorities. 



Characteristic. 


In Woman as Compared with Man. 


I. 

*Abdomen 


Size relatively greater 


Anus .... 


Situated farther back 


*Apophyses . 


Less prominent 


*Arches (supraciliary) 


Less developed 


*Arms .... 


Shorter 


^Articulations 


Less in volume 


*Base of skull 


Usually smaller 


*Beard .... 


Absent 


Bladder 


Relatively larger 


* Blood . 


Fewer red corpuscles 


* 

55 • • • • 


Less hsemoglobin 


,,.... 


Specific gravity less 


*Bones .... 


Lighter, iiiore porous, thinner 


*Bosses (parietal and 




frontal) 


More marked 


*Brain .... 


Weight relatively superior ' 


Breasts 


Distance between nipples often less 


Canine fossa 


Shallower 


Carbonic acid 


Less eliminated 


*Cartilages . 


More delicate 


Centre of body 


Higher up 


*Cephalic index 


More brachycephalic 


Cerebellum . 


Relatively larger 


Chin .... 


Usually less prominent 


Clavicle . . 


Relatively longer 


*Condyles (occipital) 


Smaller 


*Contours (of bones, etc.) 


Smoother ; more delicate 



THE CHILD AND WOMAN 



419 



Characteristic. 


In Woman as Compared with Man. 


* Cranial capacity . 


Smaller (absolutely) 


*Cranium 


Lighter, lower, more delicate 


*Crests .... 


Less marked generally 


Crests, iliac . 


Higher, wider 


Curve (lumbo-sacral) . 


More pronounced 


Ears .... 


Smaller, more dehcate, less defective 


* Erect posture 


Less removed from quadrupedal 


Eyes .... 


Slightly smaller generally 


*Eyebrows 


Less marked 


*Face .... 


Smaller, relatively broader, relatively 




shorter, lower 


Facial angle 


Somewhat more prognathous 


*Fatness 


Fatter 


Features 


More delicate 


^Feet .... 


Smaller, shorter 


Finger, index 


Longer 


*Forehead 


Straighter, narrower 


* Glabella . . 


Much less developed 


Hair .... 


More vigorous on head, less on face and 




body generally 


,,.... 


Growth greater in pubic region 


55 


Individual pubic hairs larger 


5 5 


Baldness largely absent 


""'Hands .... 


Smaller, relatively slightly shorter 


*Head .... 


Relatively longer 


Heart .... 


Smaller 


* Height 


Less generally (except ca. ii|-i4| yrs.) 


Hips .... 


Relatively larger 


*Inion . . . • 


Smaller 


Inter-orbital distance . 


Narrower 


Taw .... 


Smaller 


35 


Angles decidedly large 




Relatively smaller weight 




More rounded 


Kidneys 


Absolute weight somewhat less 


* Larynx 


Less developed 


Legs .... 


Less straight 


* Ligaments . 


More delicate 


*Liver .... 


Larger relatively 


Longevity . 


Greater 


Lungs . . • ■ 


Relatively somewhat smaller 


Malar bone . 


Edges smaller 


Malformations 


Rarer 


Mouth .... 


Wider 


*Muscles 


More delicate 


* Muscular force 


Much less 


*Navel .... 


Greater distance between navel and pubes 



420 



THE CHILD 



Characteristic. 


In Woman as Compared with Man. 


*Neck . . . . 


Relatively shorter ; rounder 


Occipital foramen 


Smaller 


Orbit .... 


Diameters smaller 


Oxygen 


Less absorbed 


Pelvis .... 


Broader, more deHcate, relatively shallower 


Perspiration and sweat . 


! Less 


Phalanges (of foot) 


I Shorter 


Pigmentation 


Darker (?) 


*Prehensility . 


Greater 


Pressure, arterial . 


Less 


Prognathism (upper 




face) 


Slightly greater 


Prognathism (total 




face) 


Greater 


*Pulse .... 


Higher 


"Respiration . 


Less vital capacity ; number of respira- 




tions per minute slightly higher 


Ribs . . . . 


Straighter, thinner 


*Ridges. 


Less marked 


Shoulders 


More sloping 


"Sinuses (frontal) . 


Less prominent 


*Skin . . . . 


More dehcate and rosy 


Spinal column 


Lumbar portion longer and more arched 


Spleen 


Larger 


Step .... 


Shorter 


Sternum 


Relatively shorter 


Stomach 


Relatively larger 


"■'Strength 


Much less 


Teeth .... 


Smaller generally (?) 


35 • • 


Two upper mid incisors larger 


"Temperature 


Somewhat higher 


^Thighs 


Markedly shorter and larger 


Thorax 


Relatively shorter and broader 


Thmnb 


Relatively shorter 


*Thyroid gland 


Larger 


Toe (great) . 


Relatively shorter 


*Trunk . _ . 


Relatively longer ' 


"^Tuberosities 


Less prominent 


Urea .... 


Less in quantity 


Urine .... 


Absolutely rather smaller in amount, rela- 




tively greater generally 


Venous system 


Capacity relatively larger 


*Weight 

n. 

^Affectability 


Less (except ca. 12J-15I yrs.) 


Greater • 



THE CHILD AND WOMAN 



421 



Characteristic. 


In Woman as Compared with Man. 


Alcoholism . 


Much less common 




Ambidextry . 


More common 




Anabolism . . 


Very much greater 




Appetite 


Smaller (?) 




Assimilative power 


Greater 




Blushing 


Very much more frequent 




*' Breaking out' (de- 






structive violence) 


More common 




Charity 


More developed 




Colour-sense 


Greater 




Cretinism 


Less common 




Criminality (except pros- 






titution) . 


Much less 




Cruelty 


Greater 




Deaf-mutism 


Less common generally 




*Destructiveness (except 






war, etc. ) . 


Greater 




*Digestion 


More rapid 




*Diseases 


Scarlet fever, scleroderma, herpes 
mitral disease, more common 


zoster. 


*Disvulnerability . 


Greater 




*Dreams 


More common 




Ecstasy 


More common 




* Emotionality 


Greater 




* Equilibrium 


More unstable 




Eye-defects. . 


More common 




*Feelings 


Much more in play 




Genius 


Much less common 




*Gluttony 


More common (?) 




"■'Hallucinations 


More frequent 




Hearing 


More acute 




* Hunger 


More frequent 




*Hypnotic phenomena . 


More common 




Hysteria 


More common 




Idiocy .... 


Less frequent 




Imbecility . 


Less frequent 




* Impulsiveness 


Greater 




Irascibility . 


More common 




* Irritability . 


More common 




Katabolism . 


Very much less 




Lefthandedness . 


More common 




Manual dexterity . 


Less (except needle-work, a few 
professions) 


special 


Memory 


Better 




Mysticism . 


Much less frequent 




*Pain .... 


Less affected 




Passions 


Those of weakness more common 





422 



THE CHILD 



Characteristic. 


In Woman as Compared with Man. 


Patience 


Greater 


Perception . 






More rapid 


Pity . 






Greater 


* Pouting 






More common 


*Precocity 






Greater 


*Ruse . 






More frequent 


Sense-judgments 






More accurate generally 


Sight . 






Range of sensation inferior ; power of 
discrimination slightly greater 


Smell . 






Less keen 


*Speech 






More fluent, especially in lower forms 


Speech-defects 






Less common 


■^'Suggestibility 






Greater 


Suicide 






Less common ; methods passive more 
commonly 


Tact . 






Greater 


Taste . 






More acute 


Temperament 






Lymphatic ; changeable 


Touch . 






Less keen (?) 


Variation 






Less (with important exceptions) 


Vice . 






Less 


Vitality 






Greater 


*Voice_. _ . 






Higher, shriller 


*Zymotic diseases 






More susceptible 


ni. 




^Abstract thought . 


More docile and receptive ; less capable 




of abstraction 


*Acting .... 


Greater ability more frequently displayed 


Adaptibility . 


Greater 


Art ... . 


Less gifted in pure artistic impulse in 




high culture 


Astrology 


Now chiefly supported by women 


Business and industrial 




capacity . . . 


More industrious, less markedly intelli- 




gent (except in the post-office and some 




other special employs) 


*Conservatism 


Greater 


ConventionaHty 




Greater 


Cunning 




Greater 


Diplomacy . 




Greater (when allowed full scope) 


*Dissimulation 




Greater, more frequent 


"Exaggeration 




Often greater 


Executive ability 




More common 


Fiction 




Less gifted as to quantity and versatility 




than as to artistic power 



THE CHILD AND WOMAN 



423 



Characteristic. 


In Woman as Compared with Man. 


*Imagination . 




Greater (among primitive peoples) 


* Individuality 






Less developed 


Intellect 






' Pure intellect ' less 


Intuition 






Much greater 


* Logic . 






Less 


Mathematics 






More gifted than generally believed 


Medicine 






More gifted than generally believed 


Metaphysics . 






Little gifted 


Music . 






Little gifted as to genius in inventing 
instrumental music and composition 


Originality . 






Less 


Painting 






Great genius rare 


Poetry 






Highest genius rare 


Politics 






Woman's genius great 


Px.eligion 






Devotion greater, creative power much 

less 
Instinct much greater 


Sacrifice 






Sculpture 






High genius very rare 


"^Simulation . 






Greater 


Singing 






Genius greater 


Superstition . 






Greater 


Sympathy - . 






Greater 



Sexual Differences in Childhood. — Professor Vitale Vitali, of 
the Royal Lyceum at Forli, has made detailed anthropological- 
pedagogical investigations of 303 boys and 372 girls, between 
the ages of 11 and 20 years, belonging to the region of the 
Romagna in Italy. Among the conclusions as to sexual 
resemblances and differences, which Dr Vitali arrives at, in this 
very important study, are the following : — 

A. Physical — i. In the girls of the Romagna there is a 
lack of that post-pubertal development which in the boys seems 
to grow out of love for physical exercise. 2. At all ages the 
trunk (height sitting) of girls is longer than that of boys, the 
lower limbs of woman, in proportion to her stature, being, as is 
well known, shorter than those of man. 3. While at all ages 
in the girls of the Romagna the finger rc;ach is greater than the 
stature, the proportion of stature to finger-reach decreases with 
age, instead of increasing, as is the case with the boys — a 
difference which Professor Vitali seems to attribute to ethnical 
influences as well as other facts connected with the lack of 
post-pubertal development. 4. The skin of girls is clearer 



424 THE CHILD 

than that of boys, also the colour of the hair and eyes, in which 
lighter shades prevail. 5. The girls are more brachycephalic 
than the boys, and the range of divergence of the cephalic 
measurements is small, woman seeming to conserve better and 
longer the racial traits. 6. The greatest differences (cephalic) 
between girls and boys — differences seemingly greater than 
those noted in other races — occur in the eleventh, twelfth and 
thirteenth years. 7. The maximum dimensions of the cephalic 
diameters are reached much sooner in girls than in boys, so 
also with the horizontal circumference — the other cephalic 
elements reach their development in girls in the 1 3-1 4th year, 
in boys at the i6th. 8. The frontal index of girls is higher 
than that of boys up to the sixteenth year, beyond that lower, 
the forehead of woman being much narrower than that of man. 

9. The face of girls is narrower and longer than that of boys. 

10. At all ages the facial angle of girls is higher than that of 
boys — women (as Ecker noted) having more convex and pro- 
minent (at top) foreheads, an aesthetic, and also an infantile 
characteristic. 11. While in boys a high facial angle seems to 
be correlated with lively intelligence, no such relation seems to 
exist in the case of girls. 

B. Physiological and Psychological. — i. The proportion of 
myopia is less among girls than among boys. 2. The chromatic 
sense (Preyer's method) is weaker (erroneous answers 16. i per 
cent, to 7.6 per cent.) in girls than in boys, and with the former 
the colour-names are later in their correlation with the corre- 
sponding perceptions. 3. The memory of visual images is much 
weaker in girls than in boys. 4. Girls are more sensitive to 
pain, more irritable, less tolerant of external excitations than 
boys ; the author concludes (with Ottolenghi) that, so far as 
their resistance to physical pain is concerned, women seem 
more sensitive, not because they resist pain less, but because 
they are less tolerant (with which Sergi also agrees). 5. Girls 
react by instinct more quickly than boys to all external excita- 
tions of a harmful nature, but react only to the present sensa- 
tion from the moment that they perceive it, and are dominated 
by it. 6. The cephalic development of girls is much more 
precocious than that of boys, and is almost complete at the 
epoch of sexual development. 7. Up to the age of 13-14 
years girls are better students than boys, then they stop sud- 
denly and remain thereafter inferior to them — sexual maturity 
bringing about, as it were, a sort of mental regression or arrest 



THE CHILD AND WOMAN 425 

of development. 8. Girls present a less proportion of cephalic 
anomalies than boys, anomalies of the forehead being the most 
numerous. 9. Physical and psychical infantilism are more 
marked in girls than in boys. 10. In girls the relation is less 
clear than in boys between moral and degenerative character- 
istics ; women, however, possess defective and intellectual 
weakness ; with them the effort is always more than the act, 
and psychical operations are more fatiguing. 11. In degenerate 
girls, as in boys, the qualities peculiar to the people of the 
Romagna — impetuosity, impulsiveness, etc. — appear in exag- 
gerated form. 12. For both boys and girls in the pre-pubertal 
epoch the harmful and fatiguing exercises of the gymnasium 
are to be avoided, and certain games (recommended by Mosso), 
walks in the country, and kindred forms of recreation to be 
preferred, while in the education of girls special attention 
should be paid to the development of the aesthetic emotions 
and feelings, and nervous work of all kinds leading to psychic 
and moral perversion, and undue stimulation or excitation of the 
sexual organs eschewed as far as possible. 13. In the post- 
pubertal period the inferior physical development of woman 
seems to be accompanied by an inferior intellectual strength, 
due largely to the lack of muscular exercise — a deficiency for 
the bettering of which Professor Vitali warmly commends 
gymnastics. 14. Intelligent girls, who are better students, 
possess a sounder organic constitution, and are more robust. 
15. The great need of girls at this period is 'increase in intel- 
lectual adaptability to the assimilation of external phenomena,' 
and this increase in the assimilating power of the intellect may 
come through well-considered physical exercises. 16. In girls 
up to the age of 14-15 years the tendencies to sobriety and 
parsimony are weak ; then with the sexual development they 
become enervated, and the apathetic tendencies predominate. 
17. In the girls of the Romagna, although the tendencies 
connected with the instinct of preservation are not so very 
persistent, those which are of a defensive or offensive nature 
{e.g., fear and anger, which take on a pathological form) are, 
as in the case of boys, very persistent ; also envy and egotism — 
intellectualised forms of male tendencies favoured by the pre- 
cocious development of the intellectual faculties of woman, her 
inferior organic development, her more sedentary life, domestic 
education, etc. 18. In both boys and girls of the Romagna 
the intellectual tendencies/ar excellence are but little developed ; 



426 THE CHILD 

aesthetic excitation, romantic ideality, altruistic feelings, 
strength of imagination (and the emotional, moral, religious 
phenomena dependent thereon), abstract tendencies, religious 
feeling, mysticism, are all more or less weak — defects which 
the author attributes to ' the stability of the psychic characters 
of this people, with whom the organising action of a few heads 
has always great success.' 19. As compared with those of 
men, the few active elements constituting personality seem, in 
woman, weak ; passionate, impressionable characters are not 
common, and the dominating tendencies undergo rapid alter- 
nations of effort and inhibition, while they do not seem to be 
so clearly determined and determining as with men. 20. The 
female character is more temperate than the male ; woman has 
a stronger instinct of preservation than man, and in all psycho- 
physical phenomena her manifestations are more passive, 
whence she is a better practical judge. 21. The persistency 
of tendencies in woman, though less than that of man, is, 
nevertheless, great. 22. Girls are more suggestible (Binet's 
method) than boys ; woman's readiness to yield to suggestion, 
Professor Vitali thinks, indicates not only little certainty of 
judgment (a mark of weak character), but largely intellectual 
indolence; girls, e.g.^ do not modify their first judgment in 
consequence of a new analysis, or at the intimation of the 
suggester, but make a new answer, opposite or contrary to the 
fiirst, as if two opposite ideas, having a common measure, made 
a saving of intellectual labour. 23. The psychic system of the 
woman of the Romagna is less coherent than that of the man, 
and the exaggerated admiration of self-qualities (leading to 
more coherence in moral qualities, etc.) is not so intense ; 
the woman of the Romagna rules in the family (but much less 
in society) because the man wills it. 24. Girls possess more 
than boys the faculty of adapting themselves and moulding 
themselves to the environment, and a larger measure of common 
sense, which, could woman develop less suggestibility, more 
self-judgment, more ability to examine and decide after analysis 
and investigation, more confidence in her own personality and 
less reliance upon the sayings and doings of others, would 
enable her to exercise greater infl.uence in civic life and social 
actions. 25. The civil and social inferiority of woman springs 
in great part from her lack of confidence in herself and from 
her passive submission ; her rise lies in the development of her 
own responsibility for her own acts, and the strengthening of 



THE CHILD AND WOMAN 427 

her will and power to impose respect. 26. The greater success 
of girls attending boys' schools is due to the increased severity 
of the milieiL and the absence of that affectation of caress and 
protection so noticeable in girls' schools. 27. Co-education 
has many very marked advantages ; girls in the community of 
life with boys tend to become free and sincere, less given to 
simulation, more able to analyse their own acts, to foresee the 
consequences of them, and to defend themselves against their 
own weaknesses. 28. In both girls and boys of the Romagna, 
emotional character not being highly developed, suggestive 
education (of the sort described by Thomas) is strongly 
recommended. 

C. Educational. — i. Generally high inteUigence and good 
school ability are parallel in the brightest girls, but in the 
pubertal epoch the percentage of scholarship is less than that 
of lively intelligence — a fact which Professor Vitali attributes 
to the less resistance to work manifested by the psychic organ- 
ism at this period. 2. The girls of the Romagna possess 
predominantly mediocre intelligence, but as related to scholar- 
ship it is superior to that of the boys, at least until the age at 
which they attend the lower secondary schools. 3. At all ages 
(method of Lindley) girls have a greater intellectual tension, 
and power to make a greater single effort. 4. The weak power 
of association of ideas (the memory of single facts is easy) in 
girls is related to weakness of will and abstraction; in women, 
the mere curiosity of sfngle facts can constitute the association 
with others and retain the memory of them. 5. For organic 
or atavistic reasons, mental operations do not excite in girls 
energetic affective states — ideas, logical reasonings, the opera- 
tions that determine knowledge, leave no lasting memory ; it 
is difficult in girls, especially at puberty, to produce and to 
maintain that condition of intense attention necessary for pro- 
moting the association of ideas. 6. The attention of women 
seems not to be motor, but static or theoretical ; from the pose 
and other external manifestations it would seem as if women 
were more attentive than men, but experiments prove that this 
state is often weakness, intellectual inertia ; in women is noted 
not that state of unconsciousness resulting from distraction, 
but a state of immobility, in which they (by reason of their 
organic constitution) remain more , easily, and with which 
agrees the condition of intellectual inertia. 7. Girls (since 
attention demands a great expenditure of physical energy) are 



428 THE CHILD 

unable to keep the intellect long in tension ; attention does 
not persist long, except by simulation, and remains in a sort 
of passive condition. 8. The spirit of observation (as seen 
from the study and teaching of natural history) is not less 
developed in girls than in boys, but may seem so, because in 
both sexes the observation does not attain with equal success 
the end of causing the mind to reflect upon the things observed, 
it being difficult to arouse in girls a reflective attitude of the 
mind towards sense-perception. 9. The imaginative and asso- 
ciative faculty in girls is w^eaker (as determined by experiments 
as to mind-content when a given word is pronounced) than in 
boys, 10. The girls of the Romagnacan, by study, rise to the 
comprehension of things, to the reason that analyses and com- 
prehends, but not to the reason that sympathises and creates. 
II. The school-girls of the Romagna, averse to minute analytic 
work, soon become fatigued when they rise to the higher 
mental operations, their development of mind not permitting 
them the intellectual emotion which urges to work and deter- 
mines the direction of psychic energy. 12. The greater 
numxber of rejections occur in the preparatory classes of the 
normal schools, in literature particularly, the number being 
much less in the sciences, which, together with the greater 
progress in the technical schools (attended by many girls). 
Professor Vitali attributes to a greater liking for the sciences 
and to the influence of co-education. 13. In the gymnasia 
the greater number of rejections take place in the Quarta and 
Quinta, and in Greek and arithmetic. 14. The best results 
among the graduates (girls) of the lyceums have been achieved 
by those devoting themselves to medicine and the sciences. 
15. Of the girls graduating from the lyceums, all were of good 
moral conduct, while of those coming from the public schools, 
5.35 per cent, seem not to have acquired in their school 
course the sentiment of moral duty. 16. The statistics of the 
normal schools seem to show that the majority of girls 
attend them, not to devote themselves to the profession of 
teaching, but to learn ; and Professor Vitali, holding the 
family and maternity to be the highest ideals of life for 
woman, would assign to the normal schools the task of pre- 
paring good women and good mothers. 17. The education 
of girls hitherto is largely responsible for the weaker will 
of woman ; education for them has been negative instead of 
positive ; the word to them has been ' abstain, be contented, 



THE CHILD AND WOMAN 429 

bear,' instead of 'will, work.' 18. The 'rests' made neces- 
sary by woman's organic constitution may be utilised for 
the cultivation of the less-developed faculties, e.g., imagina- 
tion, abstraction, etc. 

In connection with Dr VitaU's thorough-going investiga- 
tions, one may read Miss E. H. Bentley's summary of 
' Sex-Differences that have been brought out by Child- 
Study.' 

T/ie CJiild-Type and Race-Types. — That the child, the woman, 
the best types of men of genius, and the best types of men in 
modern civiHsed societies (cities especially), where the arts of 
peace outweigh the arts of war and where industrialism has 
sustained the amelioration of toil due to modern inventions, 
are the best representatives of the race-type, the promise, in 
one way or another, of the man to be, is a view held by 
many authorities, though not by all. Morselli, the Italian 
anthropologist, thinks it equally unjust to speak of the inferi- 
ority and childlikeness of woman and the senility of man, both 
types being equipotent and equivalent in their fulfilment of 
their biological, psychological and social functions; and Mante- 
gazza rather inclines to see two parallel existences that do not 
touch each other, each having a different task to fulfil, although 
in his study of physiognomy he notes the fact that the expres- 
sions of woman are often characteristically childlike, as are 
those of men of genius. Lombroso, who notes the childlike- 
ness of woman and of the man of genius, uses it, in common 
with many other writers of his school, as an argument in favour 
of the degeneracy of both. Topinard places woman, anthro- 
pologically, somewhere between man and the child. Dr Franz 
Boas^ considers that women and children present the most 
generalised forms of race-types, and argues that the children of 
all races present striking similarities as compared with the 
notable dissimilarities of their parents, although women re- 
semble one another from race to race more than do men 
(60, p. 16). The female sex, he holds, 'is in all the pro- 
portions and forms of its body more like the child than the 
male, and the most specialised types appear among the male 
sex.' But who, he asks, would think of explaining ' this earlier 
arrest of developm.ent as mark of a lower type.' The fact of early 
arrest itself is not necessarily an indication of lower type or of 
degeneracy. As Dr Boas observes (60,. p. 14) : 'While in man 
1 Science, N.S., Vol. VI. p. S83. 



430 THE CHILD 

the face develops moderately only, it grows considerably 
among the apes. The earlier arrest in this case is, there- 
fore, an indication of higher type. Thus it will be seen 
that it is not the earlier arrest alone which determines 
the place of a race, but the direction of this development.' 
The 'degeneracy' of the human face is thus a step forward, 
not backward. So, too, wdth certain of the characteristics of 
w^oman. 

That the child is 'the father of the man,' a sort of ideal 
somatic father, has been maintained by more than one writer. 
The theory of Dr Ranke on this point has been thus sum- 
marised : ' There is an ideal infant type possessing proportions 
that are common to the majority of the children of all races, 
such as large head, long body and short limbs. During 
subsequent growth, some of these features may be retarded, or 
advanced, thereby resulting in the changes which distinguish 
the races. The Mongolian stands nearest to the ideal type, 
with the Malayan next, w^hile the African is farthest away, and 
the European occupies a middle position. The progress of 
the Mongolian is tow^ards a smaller head, shorter body and 
longer limbs. The almond-shaped eyes are due only to arrested 
growth, as are the constant proportions w^hich are visible in 
the African race.' ^ 

Ranke's view, to some extent at least, is shared apparently 
by Dr Boas, w^ho, in his excellent essay on ' Human Faculty 
as Determined by Race' (60, p. 17), remarks: 'We find that 
the characteristic differences between man and ape are often 
more pronounced in the negro than in the white race, and we 
may say, with Ranke, that many proportions of the lower races 
are to a higher degree human than those of the white,' qualify- 
ing, how^ever, his statement by saying in reservation that ' the 
proportions of the body do not depend entirely upon descent, 
but just as much upon mode of life.' Havelock Ellis also 
supports in general terms the contention of Ranke, observing 
(183, p. 24) :— 

' In certain characters, how^ever, the adult European is 
distinctly at the furthest remove as w^ell from the simian and 
the savage as from the infantile condition ; this is especially so 
as regards the nose, which only reaches its full development in 
the adult white. In some other respects, as in the amount 
of hair on the body, the adult European recedes both from 
'^ Ajuer. Anthr., Vol. H. p. 316. 



THE CHILD AND WOMAN 43 1 

the specifically human and from the infantile condition, and 
rennotely approaches the ape.' 

According to Ranke, the Mongolian race (with which he 
affihates the American Indians and the Malay peoples) 
presents the most striking general analogies with the child- 
type, while the Austrahans and the negroes, in the pro- 
portions of their body, are the most remote from it — 
the European races taking a mid-position between these 
two extremes. The relatively larger head, longer trunk, 
shorter arms and legs bring the Mongolian nearer to 
the child. The peculiarities of the negro in respect of 
body-proportions, when compared with the child and with 
other races, are not theromorphic analogies, bringing him 
nearer to the ape, but rather exaggerations of the typically 
human forms — relatively smaller head, longer trunk, arms, and 
especially legs — carrying him farther along the line of upward 
development as seen in the progress of the individual from 
childhood to adult age. Ranke goes so far as to speak in the 
same terms of the black colour (not present at birth, and 
having some analogies with brownish colour in Europeans), 
the prominent lips (certainly not ape-like), the marked lumbar 
curve — these are all exaggerations of something noticeably 
human, not peculiarities that link the black races closely 
with the ape. In some respects, on the other hand, 
certain cranial peculiarities, which Virchow has noted, 
cause some of the black races to approach the child or 
the female type. Some peculiarities of the European races 
— the development of the face, the eyes, and especially the 
nose — carry them as far along the really hum.an road of 
development as do the body-characteristics just mentioned 
in the negro (520, p. 115). 

Judged by their larger head alone, the European races 
stand upon a level nearer the child than the negro, but the 
former's possession of a greater brain, together with their role 
in human history, seem to forbid the view that a develop- 
mentally low cranial form must always be associated with 
inferior abilities in general. Each race seems to possess some- 
thing, or several things, typically human (often in excess); none 
possesses every one of them. 

In his paper on 'Racial Anatomical Peculiarities,' Dr D. K. 
Shute notes the following changes or processes of evolution 
as now going on in the human body : — 



Ay- 



THE CHILD 



Character. 


Nature of Change. 


P'ace 

Facial suture . 
Cranium . 
Cranial sutures 
Canine teeth . 
3rd molar 
8th, 9th, loth ribs 
1 2th rib . 
Spinal curvatures 
Pelvis (female) 
Big toe (bones) 
Little toe (bones) 




decreasing in size 
closing earlier 
increasing in size 
closing later 
reduced in size 
tending to disappear 
reduced in size 
tending to disappear 

,, increase 
increasing in size (in correlation with cranium) 
tending (through use) to increase in size 
tending (through disuse) to decrease in size and 
number of phalanges by ankylosis 



forated 

Calcaneum (heel-bone) elongated 
Calf of leg small 
Tibia flattened 
Pelvis narrow 



As ' anatomical peculiarities, which, taken together, stamp a 
race as high or low,' Dr Shute mentions the following, which 
are more or less simioid : — 

Cranial sutures simple and uniting j Humerus unduly long and per 
early f^^^^^j 

Nasal aperture wide, with nasal bones 
ankylosed 

Jaws unduly projecting and chin re- 
ceding 

Wisdom teeth, well-developed, ap- 
pearing early and permanent 

According to Dr Shute, ' measured by these criteria, the Cau- 
casian stands at the head of the racial scale and the negro 
at the bottom' (593, p. 127). 

In the discussion on this paper, Dr Frank Baker, taking 
into consideration the modifications from primitive environ- 
ment which the anthropoids, the whites and the negroes have 
severally sustained, 'each having proceeded in development 
according to the condition of existence,' doubts the existence 
of the ' ape-like characters ' of the negro. 

'After examination of many bodies of Africans found in 
the dissecting-rooms,' says Dr Baker (593, p. 128), 'it seems 
evident that ape-like characters are no more common among 
them than among whites.' Again, in his address on 'The 
Ascent of Man,' we read : ' Between the lowest and most 
brutahsed labourers and the cultivated and intelligent classes 
there exist anatomical differences as great as those which 
separate the white and the negro' (21, p. 319). 



THE CHILD AND WOMAN 453 

No human race, according to Sir William Turner, is so 
constituted, so far as the skeleton is concerned, as to place it 
in every respect above all others, nor does there exist any one 
race whose skeletal characters are such as to place it, in all its 
peculiarities, below all other human races. While, e.g., the 
character of the skull and the pelvis in the European races 
remove them farther from the mammifers than the Australians, 
Bushmen, Negroes, etc., the proportionate relations of the 
lower limbs with the upper, of the humerus and the femur, 
bring the European nearer to the apes than are the black races 
generally. The Lapps and Eskimo, who, with respect to the 
proportions between the lower and upper limbs and between 
the humerus and the femur, are nearest to the apes of all the 
races of men, are nevertheless the farthest removed from them 
in the proportionate relations of the forearm and the arm, of 
the leg and the thigh. In respect to the proportion between 
the forearm and the arm the Fuegians seem to be the most 
pithecoid or monkey-like of men, but are very far removed 
from the apes by their pelvis, which is of a very high type. 

Tne physical differences between white and negro children 
in the United States have been very recently investigated by 
Dr Ales Hrdlicka of New York, who has carefully noted the 
racial and sexual characteristics of some iioo white and 300 
coloured children from the age of five up to or a little beyond 
puberty. Among the principal points brought out are the 
following : — i. White children generally present more diversity, 
negro children more uniformity, in all their normal physical 
characters— a peculiarity which becomes more marked as age 
increases. 2. Physical abnormalities of congenital origin are 
much less frequent in the negro child, but acquired abnor- 
malities (principally the result of rachitic conditions) are less 
frequent in the white child. In other words, the white child 
suffers more from being born, the negro child more from 
living in a certain environment. 

Dr Hrdlicka (308, p. 62) notes also the interesting fact 
that ' the coloured girl, before the age of puberty, and some- 
times even beyond this period, is a great deal more the shape 
of a boy than is the case with the white girl.' Such decidedly 
feminine characters as the shape of the shoulders and thorax, 
narrowed waist, large hips, fat thighs, which appear in white 
girls as early as eight years, do not become manifest in negro 
girls ' until after twelve years of age, or much later.' 

2 E 





% 

%' 




ALASKAN ESKIMO GIRL. 

(From ReJ>. U.S. Comm. of Edtic, 1894.) Illustrates the views 01 Fritsch as to 
primitive childhood iinder the influence of civilisation. 



THE CHILD AND WOMAN 435 

Civilisation afid Food. — Dr Fritsch, a quarter of a century 
ago, emphasised the influence of civiHsation upon the bodily 
characteristics of man, resulting sometimes 'in but a single 
generation in important modifications of the more external 
racial characteristics ' — differences which, Dr Franz Boas 
observes, ' are quite in accord with the differences between 
wild animals and domesticated animals ; and we all know 
how far-reaching the influence of domestication may become ' 
(60, p. 20). _ 

Civilisation means more or less regular work, with a 
sufficiency of reasonable food, and with these goes a rapid 
improvement in the musculature and general fulness of body, 
besides such development in particular of special limbs or 
organs as certain forms of labour and exercise inevitably entail. 
Dr Fritsch points out that the shoulder and pelvic girdle do 
not, among wild tribes (even with respect to individuals), as 
compared with racial type, reach the same degree of perfection 
found among those under the influence of civilisation. Hart- 
mann, who has studied the North African tribes, confirms 
this statement, which was made by Fritsch, concerning the 
South African aborigines. The latter even goes so far as to 
say : ' Members of aboriginal tribes in the neighbourhood, and 
under the influence of civilisation, attain the best possible 
development of body, particularly with respect to general 
rounding of form, development of musculature and skeleton, 
and, above all, in facial traits' (223, p. 125). 

The portrait of a Fingoe girl, grown up as a child-nurse 
among the whites, shows, when compared with her wild 
fellows, as Fritsch remarks, 'a softer, more rounded form of 
face, absence of the dull, wild expression, and an unmistak- 
able impress of intelligence ' — changes which, to a less extent, 
the portrait of a Fingoe man also exhibits. This greater intel- 
ligence of expression in the face has been noted by other 
observers. 

Girls especially (when the evils of white civilisation are 
kept from them) benefit much by this contact and elevation, 
for with their own people life is hard, and they develop early, 
and as quickly fade. 

Fritsch rightly warns against taking natives who have 
passed their lives in direct contact with civilisation, who have 
been brought up from childhood in the houses of the whites 
or in the missions, still more those who have grown up not in 



43^ THE CHILD 

their own country but in other lands, amid similar surround- 
ings and influences as typical aborigines. Even upon the 
adult savage such influences have their effect, while upon the 
growing child they work unceasingly to round off the sharp 
corners of the body and to light the face with the soul of a 
more expressive intelligence (223, p. 239). 

The Fingoes (Kaffirs) who carry loads through the surf at 
Port Elisabeth, in Cape Colony, and who have grown up on 
the spot, have a development of the forearm and the calf of 
the legs often far superior to that attained by the natives who 
have preserved their primitive character, and with whom the 
upper arm and the thigh are the parts more strongly developed 
in relation to the remaining musculature (223, p. 20). 

According to M. Gauttard,^ since the occurrence of the 
revolution of 1868, when the Japanese people began in 
earnest their rapid acquisition of western civilisation, some 
surprising changes in the national type have occurred, while in 
Cambodia the Europeans are said to be in process of acquiring 
the type and aspect of the natives. It has been often asserted, 
although the evidence is not at all convincing, that in the 
present population of New England there is in process a 
reversion to the type and aspect of the aboriginal inhabitants. 

For G. Delaunay (155, p- 63) evolution is nothing more 
nor less than ' the nutrition of anatomical elements.' The 
anatomical and physiological differences which 'distinguish 
races, sexes, ages, constitutions, sides of the body, etc.,' and 
which ' assure the pre-eminence of the higher race's over the 
lower, of the male sex over the female, of adults over children 
and old people, of the strong over the weak, of the right side 
over the left,' are, at birth, '■nil or almost ;z//,' but increase 
from year to year until the age of about 45 is attained, then 
diminish more and more after 50, becoming again almost nil 
or nil in old age. The race is thus composed of opposite 
biological groups, viz. : — -(i) The better nourished, more 
vigorous, more intelligent, made up of the strong (strong 
races, strong sex, strong ages, strong constitution, strong 
side) ; (2) the weaker (weak races, weak sex, weak ages, 
weak constitution, weak side). These two groups are united 
by individuals occupying intermediary stages or keeping the 
golden mean between the higher and lower groups — medium 
races, medium ages (adolescence, ripe age), people of medium 
1 Rev. Scientif., 1897, p. 569. 



THE CHILD AND WOMAN 437 

constitutions. Naturally these anatomico-physiological differ- 
ences carry with them certain pathological extremes. 

Food conditions, no doubt, account in part for the con- 
flicting statements of travellers concerning the physical condi- 
tion and appearance of savage peoples. Thus, as a result of 
the French scientific mission to Cape Horn, we learn : ' The 
Fuegians are not the ugly, ill-proportioned beings that travellers 
have represented them to be. Like most short races, they are 
rather thick-set, and the head appears disproportionately large. 
The question of nutrition has great importance in relation to 
their external form, and natives who, in a state of semi-starva- 
tion, had a lean, repulsive look, acquired surprising grace, and 
even beauty of outline, after a period of good feeding. This 
was especially noted in the Fuegians, v/ho were taken to Paris.' ^ 
The difference between a ' lean ' year and a ' fat ' year with 
some primitive peoples is sufficient to change their physical 
appearance most remarkably. Dr Frank Baker observes, 
warningly : 'Savages, when ill-fed and living in unfavourable 
conditions, may simulate the habits of anthropoids, and this 
has an effect upon their physical structure, yet not on that 
account should we too readily accept their close relationship ' 
(21, p. 319). 

Dr D. G. Brinton, in his discussion of the ' Variations in 
the Human Skeleton and their Causes,' assigns to 'deficient 
nutrition ' a very extensive and important 7'dle in the production 
of such variations, among which he mentions dwarfed stature, 
true microcephaly, spina bifida^ rickets^ ill -developed sternum, 
bones in the sutures of cranium and face, epactal bones, wormian 
bones, ossa InccE, exostoses, etc. He holds, with Bateson (against 
Darwin), that variation is greater in wild than in domesticated 
animals, and with Virchow that the 'anomalies of the bony 
structure in man are constantly and markedly greater among 
unciviHsed than among civiHsed peoples, and consequently 
greater among ancient races than among those now living,' 
believing that ' in man its increase in the savage state evidently 
depends upon fluctuations in the food supply, and frequent 
changes and excessive stress of mechanical function as the 
prime factors' (80, p. 386). Regularity and certainty of the 
food supply were, as Morgan noted, mighty factors in lifting 
the early tribes of man in the scale of culture ; the child, whose 
infancy made civilisation possible, was especially favoured, 
^ Amer. Anihrop., V. p. 92. 



438 THE CHILD 

and benefited among the primitive Aryans and Semites by the 
domestication of animals and the cultivation of plants, through 
the introduction of which he ceased to be the grudged member 
at the primitive table (435a, p. 25). All over the world la 
misere (lack, above all, of enough good things to eat), has, as 
Dr Brinton points out, made itself felt as a prime factor in the 
causation of human variation. This is so in France, where, 
according to Collignon, diminution of stature, in certain dis- 
tricts, follows closely in its wake, or in northern Europe, where, 
Virchow tells us, the dwarfish Lapps are ' Kilmmerformen, as 
compared with their cousins, the Finns,' or in the Kalahari 
desert in South Africa, with its miserable Bushmen, of whom 
the shortest are also the most wretchedly nourished. Primi- 
tive man is twin- sufferer with the modern child from this ili- 
nutrition. To be able to eat all one wants is by no means the 
endowment of all the human young at the present time, very 
many of whom are decidedly worse off under the regime of 
civilisation than when the command, ' feed my lambs,' was first 
given out, and man had made for himself a ' land flowing with 
milk and honey.' To the effect of good food, more even to 
that of fresh air and change of environment, are to be attri- 
buted the betterment and improvement of the physical condi- 
tion of children brought about by the ' outings,' ' summer trips,' 
' vacation colonies,' etc., which, since the initiative of Pastor 
Bion of Ziirich in 1876, have spread over all the countries of 
Europe, so that in Denmark ' winter outings ' even have been 
recently instituted. The general tendency of these 'outings,' 
the length of which varies from a few days or weeks to several 
months, is, judging from the accounts and descriptions of 
Varrentrapp and Bion and the more or less scattered but con- 
stantly increasing fugitive literature of the subject, to increase 
the weight of the boys and girls more and more frequently 
than their stature, although the latter is very often notably 
affected. Some of the marked increase of weight in certain 
' outings ' has been held to be due to the little exercise 
indulged in by the children, but other statistics call this in 
question. Another thing noticed is the greater effect of 'out- 
ings ' in the country and mountains as compared with the so- 
called 'town-colonies' and 'milk-colonies,' although Cologne 
in 1886 showed about the same increase in weight for both 
town and country 'colonies.' With some children no increase 
in weight or in stature could be noted, and a few even de- 



THE CHILD AND WOMAN 439 

creased in weight, while others were made sick "or not at all 
improved by the change. It was also remarked, in some cases, 
that after the return from the ' outing ' the children grew more 
slowly, or even decreased a little in weight, which decrease, 
however, was usually soon made up for. It is quite evident 
that here, as in so many other cases, no panacea for all has 
been found, and that ^outings' do not, and probably never 
can, produce the same results in all children (57). 

Dr Hrdlicka (308, p. 40), from a comparison of the meas- 
urements of Worcester (Mass.) school-children with those of 
children of the New York Juvenile Asylum as to length of 
trunk and of lower limbs, comes to the conclusion that 'it is 
possible that it is in the lower extremities where lies the prin- 
cipal defect in the growth of the badly-nourished children.' 
As is well known, the lower limbs of the new-born infant are 
very short, and for some time the limbs grow proportionately 
more than the body, 'the greatest length of the lower limbs 
seeming to be attained from the thirteenth to the sixteenth 
year,' and after the fifteenth or sixteenth year and onward till 
the cessation of growth, 'the body seems to increase sHghtly 
in proportion to the lower extremities,' the greater proportional 
growth of the latter having ceased. 

The effect of food and civilisation upon the growing child 
of all races of men is evidently very marked, but it is going 
too far to seek to explain all the differences of importance 
between the races as originally of nutritional origin, for the 
new social milieu of civilisation and the social advances of the 
race century after century must account for not a few of these 
— the decrease in the size of the jaws, etc., for example, being 
as much due to social evolution as to nutritional, and the 
same thing may be said of other departures from the brute 
type which may be found in woman and the child. The 
European child represents, in fact, a genial form of the Mon- 
gohan general type, whose childlikeness in many physical and 
mental characteristics has long been recognised. For this 
reason the study of the development of Japanese children 
who are now being brought more and more under the influ 
ence of European and American food and culture, is of the 
highest interest, as is also that of primitive peoples, capable of 
assimilating in their own way more or less of our civilisation, 
such as the unspoiled Malays of the East Indies. If the Indo- 
European child is physically but a specialised form of the 



440 THE CHILD 

Mongolian type, the history of the extreme Orient is of the 
greatest importance to the student of human evolution. 

There seems to be increasing justification for some such 
view as that just indicated, or a modified form of it, more in 
harmony with the doctrine of descent, and the significant 
relationship of woman and the child is assuming more and 
more importance in interpretative anthropology. There is deep 
truth in the words of Havelock Ellis : ' When we have realised 
the position of the child in relation to evolution we can take a 
clearer view as to the natural position of woman. She bears 
the special characteristics of humanity in a higher degree than 
man (as Burdach pointed out), and led evolution in the matter 
of hairiness (as Darwin, following Burdach, pointed out), 
simply because she is nearer to the child. Her conservatism 
is thus compensated and justified by the fact that she repre- 
sents, more nearly than man, the human type to which man is 
approximating' (183, p. 392). The study of primitive woman 
and of primitive children has hardly yet begun, but what little 
we have learned bids us hope for much more light upon the 
problems discussed in these pages from such unexhausted 
sources. 



BI BLIOGRAPH Y 

The Bibliography following contains the titles of books and 
articles made use of in the body of the book (except such as 
are sufficiently indicated in the text itself), and a few others 
upon the same topics. To save space and avoid footnotes, 
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number and page (where often repeated, by number and page). 
Thus, ' Marro (404, p. 46),' or '(404, p. 46),' signifies that 
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Psychol. Med. (London, 1892), Vol. L, pp. 202-205. 

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Monthly (Lincoln, Neb.), Vol. IX. (1898-9), pp. 400-403, 
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6. Arhmon, O., L'infantilisme et le feminisme au conseil dc 

revision. DAnthropologie (Paris), Vol. VII. (1896), 
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7. Andree, R., Das Zeichnen bei den Naturvolkern. Miff. d. 

anthr. Ges. (Wien), Vol XVII. , pp. 98-106. Also : Verh. 

d. Berl. Ges.f. Ajithr., 1888, pp. 410-412, 
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ung. Corrbl der deutschen Ges. f. Anthr. (Miinchen), 

1888, pp. 53-54- „ , 

9. von Andrian, F., Ueber Wortaberglauben. Ibid., 1896. pp. 

109-127. 

2 G 



4-66 THE CHILD 

lo von Andrian, F., Die kosmologischen und kosmogonischen 
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II. Elemental-- und Volkergedanken, ein lieitrag zur 

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veriiiahrloster Ki7ider. Berlin, 1892, p. 234. 

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■ve7^brecherischen Juge7td., etc. Berlin, 1892, pp. iv., 64. 

16. Aston, W. G., Japanese Onomatopes and the Origin of 

Language. Jou7'7i. A7ithr. List. (London), Vol. XXIII. 
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468 THE CHILD 

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470 THE CHILD 

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4/6 THE CHILD 

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546. Rohleder, H., Die Masturbation. Berlin, 1898, p. 319. 

547. Romanes, G. J., Mejital Evolutio7i iji Majt. London, 1883, 

p. 452. 
548. Meittal Evolution in Animals. London, 1884, 

p. 411. 
549. Darwin and after Darii'in. 3 vols. London, 1896. 

550. Rooper, T. G., Apperception, or A ^ Pot of Green Feathers.^ 

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551. Roussel, E., -£";?^z/dV^ sur les orpJielinats et autres etablisse- 

7nents consacres a Venfance, etc. Paris, 1881. 

552. Roux, J., Psychologie de rinsti7ict sexuel. Paris, 1898, p. 96. 

553. Ko\xx,\N., Der Ka7npf der Theile im Organismus. Leipzig, 

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554. Royer, Clemence, L'instinct social. Bull. Soc. dAnthr. de 

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555. — Sur la phylogenie ; a propos d'un lezard bipede. 

Ibid., 1890, pp. 156-206. 
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560. Saint-Paul, M., Essais sur le langage interieur. Lyon-Pans, 



490 THE CHILD 

561. Salisbury, A., A Child's Vocabulary. Ediic. Rev. (N.Y.), Vol. 

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562. von Sallwurk, E., GesimiungsimterjHcht iind Kiiltiirgeschichte. 

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579. Scholz, F., Die Chm^akterf elder des Kindes. Leipzig, 1896, 

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587. Shaw, E. R., A Comparative Study of Children's Interests. 

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594. Sidis, B., The Psychology of Suggestion. N.Y., 1898, p. 386, 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 49 1 

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492 THE CHILD 

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637. Thomson, A. C, Moravian Missions. N.Y., 1886, pp. ix., 516. 

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650. Triiper, J., Psychopathische Mmderwertigkeiten im Kindesaltej-. 

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494 THE CHILD 

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687. Wilson, T., Prehistoric Art. Rep. U.S. Nat. Mus., 1896, pp. 
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BIBLIOGRAPHY - 495 

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Verhdlttiisse der evangelischen Landbewohner im deutschen 
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696. Ziehen, T., Die Ideenassociationen der Kinder. Berlin, 1898, 

p. 66. 



I NDEX 



Abstraction, 334. 

Adolescence in various animals, 7. 

Esthetics, primitive, 183 ; of children, 
188. 

Age changes, 100. 

Alvarez, 73. 

Analogy, love of, 321. 

Anger, 270. 

Animal compared to human infancy, 3. 

Ape and infant, 29 et seq. 

Appelius, 89. 

Aschrott, 90. 

Atavism, 219 et seq; psychic, 254; ali- 
mentary, 255 ; dirt, 257 ; mimetic, 
258 ; genital, 258 ; cruelty, 259 ; mis- 
cellaneous, 263. 

Australian onomatopoeia, 115. 

Auto- erotism, 404. 

Baker, F., 232 

Barnes, E.. 88. 

Barnes, M. S., 87. 

Birth, man at, i. 

Body, in children and savages, sense of, 

314- 
Bolton, F. E., 224. 
Bos, 61. 

Buckman, S. S., 227. 
Bull-roarer, 274. 
Bullying, 262. 
Burk, F. L., 262. 

Camerer, 72. 

Chrisman, O., 86, 136. 

Christopher, W. S., 74. 

Civilisation and food, 435. 

Clicks, 131. 

Clouston, 74. 

Colour sense in infancy, 78. 

Colozza's play theory, 14. 

Compayr^, 362. 

Compound words, 145. 

Corporal punishment, 388. 

Counting, 316. 

Criminal anthropology, 354 et seq. 

Criminality in childhood, 89, 367. 

Cruelty, 259. 

Cry as origin of language, 119. 

Culture-epoch theory, 56. 

Curiosity, 344. 

Cushing, 242. 



Dancing, 181. 

Degerando, 108. 

Delaunay, G. , 100. 

Demolins, 64. 

Dendro-psychoses, 228. 

Dolls, 276. 

Dress, atavism of, 280. 

Dramatic art, 109. 

Drawings of children, 190 et seq., 453. 

Education, by play, 17, and crime, 393. 

Ellis, Havelock, on modesty, 281 ; on 
criminality in children, 361 ; on 
secondary sexual character, 398 ; on 
sexual inversion and auto-erotism, 
404 ; on sexual differentiation, 417 ; 
on position of woman, 440. 

Erect posture, 235. 

Fears, 265 et seq. 

Fickleness, 347. 

Fishing, 279. 

Festal attitude, 248. 

Food and civilisation, 435. 

Fritsch, 435. 

Froebel's play theory, 13. 

Games, of savages, 21 ; of children, 275. 

Garbini, 77, 91. 

Genital atavisms. 258. 

Genius, 35, 40 ; its normality, 45. 

Gestation periods in different animals, 3. 

Gesture, 109, no. 

Giuffrida-Ruggeri, 83. 

Groos's theory of play, 25. 

Guibert, 81. 

Gulick, L., 75. 

Gutsmuths's play theory, 11. 

Hale, 135, 137. 

Hall, Stanley, on sense of self, 228 ; on 
fears, 266 ; on anger, 270 ; on chil- 
dren's lies, 382. 

Hart well, CM., 75. 

Hegel, 56. 

Helplessness, ethical import of infantile, 4. 

Herder, 55. 

Hrdlicka, on art and literature in mentally 
abnormal, 157 ; on difference between 
white and negro children, 433; on 
defective children, 439. 



497 



498 



THE CHILD 



Huart, 72. 
Hunting, 279. 
Hutchinson, Woods, 57. 
Hydro-psychoses, 224. 

Ideals of children, 312. 

Idleness and crime, 369. 

Imagination, development of, 83 ; in chil- 
dren, 324. 

Incubation periods, 3. 

Imitation, 306, 371. 

Improvidence, 350. 

Infancy in man and animals, duration of, 
3 ; defective sense in, 77 ; colour 
sense in, 78. 

Infant and ape, 29 et seq. 

Insane as compared to child and savage, 
i57> 299. 

Japanese onomatopes, 114. 

Kiss, origin of, 259. 
Kite-flying. 275. 
Kline, L. W., 88. 
Krauss, W. C, 75. 
Kurella, 397. 
Kussmaul, 93. 

Lacassagne, 70. 

Lesshaft, 80. 

Lessing,_55. 

Linguistic evolution, 93. 

Lombroso, Cesare, 355. 

Lombroso, Paola, on play, 17 ; on gesture 

language, 113 ; on misoneism, 327 ; 

on children's morals, 391. 
Lukens, on origin of language, 123 ; on 

classification of children's words, 143 ; 

on art of childhood, 198. 
Lying in children, 381 et seq. 

Macdonald, a., 72. 

Magic and art, 200. 

Mantegazza, on emotional expression, 69 ; 

on gesture, 109 ; on psychic atavism, 

.254- 
Married couples, resemblance between, 32. 
Marro, 412. 
Mason, O.T., 415. 
Masturbation, 404. 
Memory, 341. 

Mental characters of savages, 296. 
Metopic suture, 283. 
Misoneism, 327, 365. 
Modesty, 281. 
Morals of children, 391. 
Morgan's views, 57. 
jNIorrison, W. D., 377. 
Muscular anomalies, 235. 
Music, origin of, 174 ; effects of, 197 ; 

primitive, 180; and children, 182; 

universality of, 452. 
Mythology of children, 317. 

Name-giving, 149 et seq. 
Nature, feeling for, 327. 
Negro children, 433. 
Nipples, supernumerary, 400. 

Olfactive sense In infancy, 77. 
Onomatopceia, ti^ et seq. 



Originality, 349. 
Ornamentation, 185. 
Orophily, 520. 

Passion, 347. 

Pelvis, survivals in, 234. 

Play, the meaning of, 10 et seq. 

Posture, erect, 235 ; foetal, 248 ; in child- 
birth, 249 ; in fatigue and excitement, 
250. 

Powell, J. W., 60. 

Precocity, in Intelligence, 38 et seq. ; of 
genius, 42 ; sexual, 408. 

Prehensile foot, 246. 

Pronouns, 144. 

Prostitution, 370. 

Puberty, linguistic development at, 139 ; 
changes at, 411. 

Punishment, corporal, 388. 

QUANTZ, 228. 

Races, children of lower, 34. 
Reduplication, 124. 
Religion in childhood, 86. 
Ribot, 86. 

Right-handedness, 241. 
Robinson, Louis, 229, 231. 
Rudimentary organs, 223. 

Sanford, E. C, 67. 

Savages, play among, 20. 

Schiller's play theory, ic. 

Scott, Colin, 103. 

Secondary sexual characters, 397. 

Secret languages, 136. 

Sexual perversions, 402 ; Inversion, 404 ; 
precocity, 408 ; sexual differences, in 
development, 409 ; in relation to 
civilisation, 417 ; list of chief, 418 ; 
In childhood, 423. 

Sigismund, B., 92. 

Sign language, 107, iii. 

Skeuomorphism, 197. 

Songs of children, 276. 

Springer, 71. 

Starbuck, E. D., 87. 

Stelnmetz, 379. 

Story-telling, 345. 

Suckling period, duration of, 5. 

Suggestion, 305, 371. 

Suicide, 379 

Swimming, 252. 

Symbolism, 322. 

Taboo, 309. 
Tarde, 306. 
Teasing, 262. 
TIgerstedt, 71. 
Truancy, 88. 
Turner, Sir W., 236. 

Verrier, 70. 

Viscera, survivals in, 234. 

Vltall, 423. 

Vocabulary, extent of, 160. 

Vocal evolution, 91. 

Vowel speech, 127. 

Wallaschek, 180. 
Weapons, 273. 



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By C. J. S. THOMPSON. 

[Extract from Preface.] 

Too much care cannot be taken of the exterior of the human body, on 
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\Vestward Ho ! [man 
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Two Years Ago 
In His Steps 
Crucifixion of Phillip 

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His Brother's Keeper 
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House of the Seven 

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1 EOMANCE OF KING ARTHUR. 

2 THOREAU'S WALDEN. 

3 THOREAU'S "WEEK." 

4 THOREAU'S ESSAYS. 

5 ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 

6 LANDOR'S CONVERSATIONS. 

7 PLUTARCH'S LIVES. 

8 RELIGIO MEDICI, &c. 

9 SHELLEY'S LETTERS. 

10 PROSE WRITINGS OF SWIFT. 

11 MY STUDY WINDOWS. 

12 THE ENGLISH POETS. 

13 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. 

14 GREAT ENGLISH PAINTERS. 

15 LORD BYRON'S LETTERS. 

16 ESSAYS BY LEIGH HUNT. 

17 LONGFELLOW'S PROSE. 

18 GREAT MUSICAL COMPOSERS. 

19 MARCUS AURELIUS. 

20 TEACHING OF EPICTETUS. 

21 SENECA'S MORALS. 

22 SPECIMEN DAYS IN AMERICA. 

23 DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. 

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25 DEFOE'S SINGLETON. 

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27 PROSE WRITINGS OF HEINE. 

28 REYNOLDS' DISCOURSES. 

29 Papers of Steele and Addison. 

30 BURNS'S LETTERS. 

31 VOLSUNGA SAGA. 

32 SARTOR RE3ARTUS. 

33 WRITINGS OF EMERSON. 

34 LIFE OF LORD HERBERT. 

35 ENGLISH PROSE. 

36 IBSEN'S PILLARS OF SOCIETY. 

37 IRISH FAIRY AND FOLK TALES 

38 ESSAYS OF DR. JOHNSON. 

39 ESSAYS OF WILLIAM HAZLITT. 

40 LANDOR'S PENTAMERON, &c. 

41 POE'S TALES AND ESSAYS. 

42 VICAR OF WAKEFIELD. 

43 POLITICAL ORATIONS. 

44 Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. |102 

45 POET AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLL. 103 



I 90 
! 91 
92 
i 93 
94 
95 
96 

: 97 

,98 
' 99 
100 
101 



46 Professor at the Breakfast-Tabll 

47 CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS. 

48 STORIES FROM CARLETON. 

49 JANE EYRE. 

50 ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND. 

51 WRITINGS OF THOMAS DAVIS. 

52 SPENCE'S ANECDOTES. 

53 MORE'S UTOPIA. 

54 SADI'S GULISTAN. 

55 ENGLISH FAIRY TALES. 

56 NORTHERN STUDIES. 

57 FAMOUS REVIEWS. 

58 ARISTOTLE'S ETHICS. 

59 PERICLES AND ASPASIA. 



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PLATO'S REPUBLIC. 
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HEINE IN ART AND LETTERS. 
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PLAYS OF MAETERLINCK. 
WALTON'S COMPLETE ANGLER. 
LESSING'S NATHAN THE WISE. 
STUDIES BY RENAN. 
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SCHOPENHAUER. 
RENAN'S LIFE OF JESUS. 
CONFESSIONS of St. AUGUSTINE 
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LITERATURE (G. H. Lewes). 
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RENAN'S ANTICHRIST. 
ORATIONS OF CICERO. 
REFLECTIONS on the REVOLU- 

TION IN FRANCE (E. Burke). 
LETTERS OF THE YOUNGER 

PLINY. (Series L) 
Do. (Series IL) 

SELECTED 'J HOUGHTS OF 

BLAISE PASCAL. 



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1 CHRISTIAN YEAR 

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3 LOxNGFELLOW 

4 CAMPBELL 

5 SHELLEY 

6 WORDSWORTH 

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8 WHITTIER 

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47 DAYS OF THE YEAR 

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